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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



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Fundamental Questions 



CHIEFLY RELATING TO THE BOOK OF GENESIS AND THE 

HEBREW SCRIPTURES 



BY 



EDSON L. CLARK 

Minister of the Congregational Church, Southampton, Mass.; Member of 

the American Oriental Society ; Author of " The Arabs and the 

Turks," and " The Races of European Turkey" 



c^ofwas.-v 



NEW YORK 

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 

27 & 29 WEST 23D STREET 
1882 






Copyright by 
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 

1882 



Press of 
G. P. Pu!na??i's Sons 

Neiv York 



PREFATORY. 

THESE theses are an attempt to solve, in the light of 
the latest and maturest results of historical, archaeological 
and scientific investigation, some of those great prob- 
lems which have of late so agitated the Christian public. 
They are also a humble endeavor in the direction of that 
new Theology, a Theology historical, inductive, and 
strictly scientific, which is already taking form, and 
which is sure, at no distant day, to stand forth in full 
development to command the acceptance and belief of 
Christian men. Investigation has not finished its work, 
the realm of truth is as yet but half explored, and I am 
quite aware that the views and conclusions here pre- 
sented can be, at the best, but an approximation to the 
truth. I offer these theses to the public, confident of 
but one thing respecting them, which is, that they are an 
attempt in the right direction ; but in the hope that, 
however short they may have fallen of their aim, they 
may at least prove helps and stepping-stones to others in 
a better and more successful search after the truth. 

Southampton, Mass., 

July I, 1882. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. 

PAGE 

Divine Revelation i 

CHAPTER II. 
The Creation 13 

CHAPTER III. 
The Unity of Life 28 

CHAPTER IV. 
The Image of the Divine 44 

CHAPTER V. 
The First Family 54 

CHAPTER VI. 
The Childhood of the Race .64 

CHAPTER VII. 
The Flood : The Glacial Age : The Antediluvian World 76 

CHAPTER VIII. 
After the Flood ...... » 104 

CHAPTER IX. 

From Noah to Abraham . . . . . , „ .112 

v 



VI CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER X. 
The Patriarchal Dispensation 135 

CHAPTER XI. 
Right and^Wrong „ 148 

CHAPTER XII. 
Nevertheless .*.......,. 161 

CHAPTER XIII. 

Inspiration : The Hebrew Language : The Earlier Hebrew 

Scriptures ...... 174 

CHAPTER XIV. 
Knowledge of God . 199 

CHAPTER XV. 
The Man Divine 210 



Fundamental Questions. 



CHAPTER I. 

DIVINE REVELATION. 

I HAVE been called upon to give the reasons why I be- 
lieve that the Bible is a divine revelation, the Word of 
God. The request is personal to myself. It is not that 
I should set forth the general, theological argument for 
the truth of the Scriptures, but that I should give the 
reasons why I myself believe, as I do without a shadow 
of doubt, that the Bible is a revelation from God. This 
auestion I will endeavor to answer. 

And in the first place, negatively : 

• It is not because the Bible so asserts for itself. The 
Koran does the same ; and on this ground I could not 
tell which to choose, or whether the claims of both might 
not be equally false. 

Nor is it because the Church so teaches; or because I 
was brought up in this belief, and those around me so 
believe. The Mohammedan and the Hindu might be- 
lieve in their sacred books for the same reasons, and I 
should be no better off than they. 



— 



FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 



Nor does my faith rest, primarily, upon the miracles of 
the Bible. These miracles were evidence to those who 
saw them of a divine power and authority in those who 
wrought them ; but they are not so to me. I ask, I have 
the right to ask, I am compelled to ask : Were these mira- 
cles ever wrought according to the account here given ? 
No amount of human testimony, no conceivable weight 
of evidence given by those who claimed to have been 
witnesses of the fact, could ever prove to me that a miracle 
had been wrought in our own day. Suppose it were 
claimed, as it was claimed a few years ago in behalf of a 
Roman Catholic priest in Pennsylvania, that a man of 
our own time had raised a dead body to life. And sup- 
pose that a thousand of the best, the wisest, the most 
honest of men should testify under oath that they had 
seen the miracle performed. Their united testimony 
would bring no conviction to me. I should still feel that 
there must have been some deception or some mistake. 
To me such a miracle could not be proved. And of the 
miracles recorded in the Bible, I must have evidence 
very clear and very decisive before I can believe in them 
at all. I do believe in them with an undoubting faith, 
because they are recorded in the Word of God ; but I 
could believe them on no other evidence. I must first 
find other proof that the Bible is true before I can be- 
lieve in the miracles. But when on other grounds I am 
convinced that the Bible is the Word of God, and that 
its record is perfect truth, then, with fullest faith I can 
believe in the miracles there recorded. Then these mira- 
cles assume to my mind an importance and value which 
no words can express. I see in them the clearest possi- 
ble manifestation and illustration of the power and au- 
thority, the presence and the providence, the grace and 
the guardian care of our Father and our God. 



DIVINE RE VELA TION. 3 

Nor, once more, do the prophecies, by themselves 
alone, afford a sufficient ground for my faith ? After I 
believe in the Bible, the prophecies appear to me a glori- 
ous embodiment of the truth of God. But if, on 
other grounds, I doubted the truth of the sacred volume, 
I should be able, as others have been, to explain the 
prophecies away. 

And now positively : Why do I believe, with a faith 
so perfect that to me all doubt is impossible, that the 
Bible is the Word of God ? 

I believe this : 

I. — Because the Bible, though many, is one. 

The Bible is certainly the most heterogeneous book 
ever compiled. It was composed by some forty differ- 
ent writers, each expressing freely his own ideas, at in- 
tervals stretching through fifteen hundred years of time, 
in states of society immensely different, and in four dif- 
ferent languages. In the work of these many writers we 
find literary compositions of almost every kind. There 
are history, law, poetry, prophecy, biography, personal 
narratives, — preaching, philosophy, and letters. Never, 
surely, in any other case, was such a singular medley of 
dissimilar materials united in a single book. And yet, 
the more I study it, the more deeply do I feel that no 
other book was ever so absolutely one. From first to 
last, from beginning to end, it is one teaching, one 
truth, in perfect harmony with itself. But more than 
this. In this truth of the Bible there is a regular and 
wonderful development. From beginning to end, 
through all these many and various treatises, the one 
doctrine steadily grows and expands ; unfolding itself 
into a grand and symmetrical system of truth, which at 
last stands before us perfect and complete. As I think 
of this unity, and this grand development of truth, 



4 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

which characterize the Bible as a whole, I see clearly and 
certainly one mind, one intelligence, one purpose, one 
supervising control. But what mind, and what supervis- 
ing control? I know of but one possible answer to this 
question. I must say, as the great apostle said eighteen 
centuries ago : All Scripture is given by inspiration of 
God. 

But I believe this : 

II. — Because the Bible is more than a systematic unfold- 
ing of truth ; because, in its moral teachings, it is only 
truth. 

From first to last there is no error, no false teaching, 
nothing wrong. This is the great wonder. Here is a 
book of which the fundamental and most essential 
parts were unquestionably written more than three 
thousand years ago, before science, before philosophy 
was born ; when darkness covered the earth, and 
gross darkness the people. How was it possible that a 
book so written, by such men, at such times, amid such 
surroundings, should have been kept so entirely free 
from all error, from all false views and false teachings of 
every kind ? To this question I can see but one answer. 
I am constrained to say again : All Scripture is given by 
inspiration of God. 

I believe this — 

III. — Because the Bible is the full explanation, and the 
only possible explanation, of the world and the mystery of 
time. 

Without the Bible, the aspect which the world presents 
to our minds, through all its history, is dark and gloomy 
indeed. To many a materialistic philosopher, rejecting 
the Bible, having no faith in God, and no faith in his fel- 
low-men, the world has seemed, as with such views it 
might well seem to him, a mere chaos, without order or 



DIVINE REVELATION. . 5 

purpose, or end. It has seemed one vast bear garden; 
a wild arena of warring forces, principles and passions, 
dark, evil, and hopeless. Human life has seemed an 
evil, a scene of misery and trouble, the man of learning 
not the happier for his superior knowledge, but only 
worse off than other men, because seeing the evils 
around him more clearly than they. The world itself, 
if created at all, these men have been ready to pronounce 
one huge botch and abortion of the Creator's hand. 
Doubtless, for these dismal teachings of a wretched athe- 
ism, even without the Bible, there is neither reason nor 
excuse. Doubtless, as Paul has told us in the first chap- 
ter of Romans, it is possible to learn, and to learn 
with clearness and certainty, much of God, much of his 
character and government, and much of the plan of his 
providence, from the book of Nature alone. But the 
world is full of mystery, and full of great and terrible 
evils, which science alone could never explain, which 
without the Bible we could never understand. But no 
sooner do we open the Bible and understand its teach- 
ings than at once all is order, all is light. The Bible ex- 
plains to us the world and the mystery of time. It 
teaches us to see, in the long history of the physical crea- 
tion and of the human race, the steady unfolding of the 
vastest, grandest plan ever known or imagined by the 
human mind ; a plan reaching from eternity to eternity; 
a plan all - comprehending, harmonious, complete, in 
which our reason can rest with full satisfaction and con- 
tent. 

But here surely is a most wonderful thing. The Bible 
explains to us clearly and certainly the universal plan, 
the grand unfolding of this world's history ; and yet the 
last verse of the Bible was written more than eighteen 
hundred years ago, in the very childhood of scientific 



6 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

knowledge, and when as yet this grand unfolding and de- 
velopment had never been seen, had never been imagined 
or dreamed of by any human mind. How was it possi- 
ble that such a book should be to us and to all the 
coming generations of men the one and only key, but 
the sure and sufficient key, to unlock and explain the 
whole mystery of time? Again I say — I can give but 
one answer to this question : — This book was given by 
inspiration of God. 

I believe that the Bible is a divine revelation — 

IV. — Because in every point God has endorsed and ver- 
ified it in his other book, the book of his works and his 
providence. 

The Bible tells us of God, a God holy, omnipotent, and 
supreme. It tells us that God made man in his own im- 
age, with boundless capacities for progress and growth. 
It tells us of the law of God, holy, just, and good, which 
all men are bound to obey. It tells us that virtue and 
righteousness are the necessary conditions of human 
well-being, and that the wages of sin is death. It tells 
us that all men had sinned ; that the world was lost in 
sin, dark in the gloom of a moral night. It tells us that 
for this dark and evil world, God had purposes of mercy 
and redeeming grace ; that far back in the early ages of 
human history he established in the world a kingdom of 
righteousness and truth; that in the fulness of time he 
sent forth his Son to preach far and wide the blessed 
tidings of salvation for all ; that the Christian Church, 
founded upon the Gospel of the crucified and risen Son 
of God, was destined to extend its peaceful conquests, 
until Christ the Lord should reign in millennial glory over 
all the earth. 

Now all this is given us as the moral plan and diagram 
of the world we live in, of the system of things of which 



DIVINE REVELATION. 7 

we ourselves form a part ; and whether it is true or not 
true, we can very easily ascertain. 

I have in my hands a description of what is called the 
great Corliss engine ; a gigantic motive power which is 
said to move its acres of powerful machinery in the 
great hall at Philadelphia as easily and quietly as the 
clock ticks upon my shelf. I have full plates and dia- 
grams of this tremendous engine, with complete state- 
ments and calculations of all that it is, and all that it can 
do. Now how shall I verify these statements, and 
assure myself whether there really is in existence any 
such thing as the mighty machine here described? It is 
very easily done. With my papers in my hand I go to 
Philadelphia, stand in the presence of the great engine, 
and look upon it as it does its work. Point by point I 
compare my drawings and specifications with the actual 
facts before me, and in every particular I find them 
perfectly true. 

And so I take the Bible and place it side by side with 
the living, moving world ; comparing it point by point 
with the actual reality of things in the history of the 
world and the experience of men. Most satisfying, most 
decisive is the result. As face answereth to face in 
water, so do the facts of the moral world answer to the 
written Word. Here is the hand of God, a God just, 
omnipotent, and supreme. Here are the law and the 
kingdom of God, everywhere controlling the destinies of 
men. Here are the blessings of virtue and righteousness, 
and here is the curse of an inexorable law upon all 
wickedness and wrong. Here are men ignorant and sin- 
ful, guilty and lost ; and here also are men forgiven and 
cleansed, transformed and redeemed. Here, too, is 
Christianity, the one grand, central fact of human his- 
tory, subordinating all other facts to itself, ever extend- 



o FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

ing its peaceful reign, and holding in itself the certain 
promise of a coming day when a Christian freedom, with 
all its attendant blessings, shall become the common 
birthright of all mankind. So is the written Word veri- 
fied and confirmed by the facts of history and experience. 
God has endorsed it ; he has repeated it, and written it 
over again in his works and his providence. I know 
that it is true. We say : There are two books of God, 
the book of his written Word and the book of his 
works. But these books are not two ; they are but halves 
of one perfect, harmonious whole, each dependent upon 
and explaining the other, the second book rewriting and 
verifying the first. The Bible is the explanation of the 
world ; it is the law of the world ; it is the plan of God's 
kingdom in the world ; it is the promise and hope of 
the world : and, therefore, I know that it is given by 
inspiration of God. 

On these grounds I feel that the demonstration is 
complete. For full assurance in my faith I need no 
further evidence. Yet there are still other proofs as 
convincing to my mind as those already cited. For — 

V. — The Bible commands my conscience. 

The law of right and truth written in the Bible is a law 
written with equal clearness and authority upon my own 
nature. I see and know that the God who made me, who 
gave me my being, and fixed the laws of my nature, is the 
author also of this written Word. That which the Bible 
tells me is right, I feel and know is right. That which 
the Bible tells me is wrong, I feel and know is wrong. 
And so it is with virtue and the rewards of virtue, with 
sin and the punishment of sin, with religion, with holi- 
ness of heart and life, with all duties to men, with all 
duties to God. On every page the Bible appeals to my 
own nature, to my reason, to my conscience. Every 



DIVINE RE VELA TION. 9 

word is a word of authority to which my conscience, my 
reason, my whole being is constrained to bow. It speaks 
to me as God's Word, a Word heard, recognized, acknowl- 
edged. It binds my conscience. To me it is the Word 
of God. 

But I hold this great truth for another reason, which, 
to me, is full and sufficient in itself alone. It is be- 
cause — 

VI. — In the Bible my soul finds full satisfaction for 
every longing, for every need. 

I long for some certain knowledge of God, and here 
God is fully, clearly revealed. I long no less for some 
clear and satisfying knowledge of myself. I want to 
know who and what I am, from what source I sprung, for 
what end I was made, by what laws I am bound, how 
long I am to exist, and what destiny lies before me. I 
open the Bible, and there all these questions are fully 
answered. As it reveals God to my knowledge, so it 
reveals me to myself. I long to know what is right and 
what is wrong; what duties I owe, and what evils I must 
avoid ; what will debase and enfeeble my nature and 
work me ill ; and what will strengthen, ennoble, and per- 
fect my manhood. I long to know what course of life I 
must pursue to promote and ensure my highest good* 
and to escape that wreck and destruction of my moral 
interests, of which I see dangers on every hand. All these 
things the Bible tells me, tells me clearly, tells me with 
authority, and with a fulness of knowledge which satis- 
fies my soul. I long for some promise, some steadfast 
hope to illumine the dark unknown of the future before 
me, and I find it here. I long for a Father's love, for a 
Father's guidance and care; and here my desires are 
satisfied. I long, as even the poor Hindu has longed 
these three thousand years, and as the human soul must 



IO FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

always long, for union and fellowship with the divine : 
and here comes to me the blessed assurance : Beloved, 
now are we the sons of God. I long for the opening of 
some large, some immortal destiny to my immortal life; 
and here such a destiny opens gloriously before me. All 
this the Bible does for me, and the Bible alone. I know 
that it must be from the same hand which gave me my 
being. Every gift fills a want which God has made, 
satisfies a longing which God has implanted. It is all the 
Word of a Father's love, a Father's wisdom, a Father's 
truth. To every word my soul responds. I feel, I know 
that it is true. It is the Word of God. 

These, then, are the grounds of my faith, the reasons 
why I believe, with fullest conviction, that the Bible is 
the Word of God. 

i. Because, in all its many books, it is one complete 
and harmonious whole. The work of many different 
authors, each of them writing naturally and freely, in 
different languages, in widely varying stages of society, 
and through fifteen centuries of time, the Bible is yet 
one embodiment of steadily unfolding truth, harmonious, 
symmetrical, complete. 

2. Because the Bible is truth, and only truth. From 
beginning to end, in all its moral teachings, there is no 
error, no false teaching, nothing wrong. It is truth pure 
and unalloyed. 

3. Because it is the full and only explanation of the 
mystery of time and the world in which I live. With- 
out the Bible the world is a wild battle-ground of con- 
tending forces, full of disorders, and full of evils, the 
mystery of which no human wisdom could ever explain. 
I open the Bible, and at once the mystery is explained ; 
confusion becomes order, and darkness light. In this 
divine revelation I see the creating God, the sustaining 



DIVINE REVELATION. II 

providence, the wise and all-controlling purpose, the 
glorious and surely approaching end. 

4. Because this book of his holy Word God has en- 
dorsed and confirmed, verified and written over again, in 
his other book, the book of his works and his provi- 
dence. 

5. Because it binds my conscience. Because the law' 
of right and truth written in this book is written also 
upon my own nature. Because it appeals with irresistible 
force to my own nature, my own conscience, my own 
reason. Because it is a Word of divine authority, before 
which my whole being is constrained to bow. 

6. Because it satisfies my soul. In this book every 
longing of my immortal nature is satisfied, every want 
is met and filled. It gives me the knowledge of God 
and the knowledge of myself. It irradiates with clear 
and certain light the whole duration of my existence, in 
time, and in the future beyond. It gives me the promise 
of a Father's love and protecting care ; of a Saviour's re- 
deeming and transforming grace; and of everlasting bles- 
sedness and glory in the life to come. It tells me all 
that I need to know, and in it my soul is at rest. 

And now, to sum up all in a single word : 
I believe that the Bible is the Word of God because it 
is the sun of my moral and spiritual world. 

The untaught rustic, as he looks up to the sun shining 
in the heavens, has little philosophy respecting its light 
and heat. He only sees its glory, and rejoices in its 
beams. He knows that to him the sun is comfort and 
food, is light and life ; that without the sun, he, and the 
whole world of living things, must speedily die in frozen 
night. And so it is that the humble and unlettered 
Christian, although he can give no clear and logical state- 
ment of the grounds of his faith, feels and knows that 



12 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

the Bible is the Word of God. It is the sun of the moral 
world, and of his own spiritual life. It dispels all dark- 
ness, reveals all things in earth and heaven, in time and 
eternity, to his eye of faith. But even this figure does 
not include all that the Bible is to him. It is more than 
light and warmth. It is the bread on which he feeds. It 
is water, living water, for his thirst. It is balm and heal- 
ing for his spiritual maladies and infirmities. It is com- 
fort and peace in times of sorrow and trouble. It is life 
immortal and divine. For by it are given unto him ex- 
ceeding great and precious promises, whereby he is made 
partaker of the divine nature. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE CREATION. 

The Bible is the Word of God, but not his only- 
Word. He has two books, each of them written by his 
own finger, and one of them just as much the record of 
his truth as the other. One of these books is his re- 
vealed Word ; the other is the book of his works and 
his providence. These two books are intended to go 
together ; and neither of them can be understood unless 
studied in the light of, and as explained by, the other. 
This is pre-eminently true of the first chapter of the book 
of Genesis. This chapter cannot be understood if studied 
in the light of Scripture alone. Thus studied, it seems to 
teach that the whole work of creation was performed in 
six days of twenty-four hours each. So for thousands of 
years it was understood. But in God's other book we 
have the parallel record, written out in almost infinite 
fulness and minuteness. And no sooner do we begin to 
study this record than we see at once how entirely inade- 
quate and erroneous is the old interpretation of this pas- 
sage of the written Word. We see that the word day is 
used in this chapter, not of a single revolution of the 
earth upon its axis, twenty-four hours in length, but of an 
epoch, or long period of time ; and that we have in this 
chapter, condensed into a single page, the outline of an 
inconceivably vast and multiform system of the works of 
God, carried on through millions of years. We see also 
that this outline, although written in the infancy of hu- 

13 



1 4 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

man knowledge, and thousands of years before true 
science had its birth, is yet scientifically correct and 
true ; that upon this point, as upon every other, God's 
two books are in perfect harmony and agreement, ex- 
plaining and substantiating each other. 

Upon the truth and authenticity; of this record of the 
book of nature, parallel to and explaining the history of 
creation in the book of Genesis, in respect to its leading 
facts and the general course of events, there rests not 
the shadow of uncertainty. It lies spread before us just 
as God wrote it and left it, for the instructed mind to read 
in the certainty of knowledge. 

Let us now address ourselves to the study of this bibli- 
cal record of the six days of creation, as it is illuminated 
and explained by the record of God's other book, the 
book of his works in the realm of nature. As we do 
this, I think we shall see the perfect harmony of the two 
records, the perfect agreement of this first chapter of 
Genesis with what are thus far the well-established facts 
of geological science. 

As we begin our study, there are three preliminary 
points to be observed. 

I. This chapter was written in the earliest age of 
human cultivation and intelligent thought ; an age of 
which both the ideas and the language were very meagre 
and narrow, the merest germs of what they were after- 
ward to become. And yet the thought and language of 
this early age, the simple childhood of the race, were the 
only medium through which, at that time, the great reve- 
lation could be communicated and expressed. All that 
could be given, under these circumstances, was a simple, 
pictorial outline of a vast and stupendous process, of 
which, in its actual unfolding, the writer of this chapter 
was capable of no true conception. 



THE CREATION. 1 5 

2. The writer tells the story of the creation as it 
would have appeared to his own view, if he could have 
watched it through all its course from his own standpoint 
upon the surface of the earth. He could, in fact, tell the 
story in no other way. Of science, of the heavenly bod- 
ies, of any other world than this, he knew nothing at all. 
He must tell the story, if he told it at all, from his own 
point of view. We shall find this point of the very high- 
est importance to a correct understanding of the first 
chapters of Genesis. 

3. As a history of the actual unfolding of the vast sys- 
tems of animal and vegetable life, the account given in 
the first chapter of Genesis is, and was meant to be, very 
incomplete. The actual process of this creation was a 
work immense and boundless almost to infinity; a work 
carried on, probably, through millions of years. In the 
thought and language of that early age that story could 
not be told. Neither the writer of this chapter, nor any 
other human being for many centuries afterward, was 
capable of understanding it. All that could be done, all 
that there was any occasion to do, was just that which 
was done, and done completely, perfectly, in this chapter. 
The work of creation was made to pass in vision before 
the writer's mind in six successive stages, each having 
its beginning, its progress, and its end. But of the 
time covered by these several stages, whether it were 
a day or an age, he evidently had no idea. We have 
thus given us in this chapter a simple and pictorial, but 
full and comprehensive outline of the great creative 
work as, through all its successive stages, it was begun, 
carried forward, and completed by the almighty power 
of God. The account of the creation thus given was 
fully sufficient for the instruction of men through all the 
earlier stages of their intellectual development, and one 



l6 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

which, when science should have explored and interpreted 
the full history of the material universe from the pages 
of God's other book, would be found in perfect harmony 
and agreement with that larger record. 

With these three points in mind, let us pass on now to 
the study of this history of the work of creation in its 
six successive days. 

I. "In the beginning," we read, "God created the 
heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, 
and void ; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. 
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. 
And God said : Let there be light ; and there was 
light. And God divided the light from the darkness, 
the day from the night. And the evening and the morn- 
ing were the first day." In his other book, God has 
given us a full and minute history of this first stage 
of his great creative work. From this record we know 
that this first day of creation was a period of almost in- 
conceivable length. And yet it is the simple truth 
that of the vast development of all these millions of 
years, the brief statement contained in these four verses 
of the first chapter of Genesis is scientifically true and 
exact. The earth was truly without form, and void, a 
mere burning chaos of the elements. And when, in the 
slow lapse of ages, its crust cooled and hardened, and the 
waters began to gather upon its surface, darkness was 
upon the face of the deep. Not because there was no 
light, for the sun was in its place, shining then as now. 
But upon the surface of the globe, the stand-point from 
which the sacred narrative is given, all was rayless, in- 
penetrable darkness. And why? Because the tre- 
mendous heat of the fiery mass of the earth had driven 
off in the form of vapor every thing that could be vapor- 
ized among all its elements, — all that now makes the 



THE CREATION. 



17 



6th 
Day 



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Modern. 



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Birds. 

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Oaks, Figs, 
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Palms, 
Cycads, 
Pines. 



4th < 
Day 



3d 
Day 



2d 

Day 



1st 
Day 



t/3 
O 

O 






Permian. 



Carboniferous, or 
Coal Period. 



Devonian. 



Silurian. 



Cambrian. 










u 








N 


•4 


O 


4-> 


8 


c 
u 






cS 


u 


Ph 


c 

< 







Oceanic Period. 

Diminution of life. 

Signs of glacial cold. 



Amphibians. 

Fishes. 

Mollusks. 

Corals. 

Crustaceans. 



Immense vegeta- 
tion — Tree-ferns, 
Club-mosses, and 
Pines. 

Mosses. 



Algae. 



Slates, 

with Primitive 
Limestone. 



Slates, 

with Graphite 
or Plumbago. 





. 




u 




c 









1—1 









U-. 


S) 








c 


w 


■s 




d 




Q 







Abundant development of coralline 
animal life, source of Primitive 
Limestone. 



Abundant growth of sea-weed or 
sea-moss in heated ocean waters, 
source of the Graphite. 



Gneiss, 
and other 
Metamorphic 
Rocks. 



Granite. 









0) 


< 










First glimmer of light. 



Waters of a universal boiling ocean. 



Deluges of rain — vapor growing 
thinner. 



Cooling crust surrounded by mass of 
densest vapor. 

A burning Globe. 



1 8 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

waters of the sea and land, all the sulphur, all the metals, 
and a large part of the material of all the stratified 
rocks. And through this huge mass of densest, blackest 
vapor, everywhere enfolding the earth, no ray of light 
could penetrate to its surface. 

But in the long course of ages a great change took 
place. The burning globe was slowly but steadily cool- 
ing off; and as the cooling process went on, huge and 
constant deluges of thick, corrosive rain were poured 
upon the now solid crust, until the waters of a vast and 
boiling ocean covered the whole surface of the earth. 
And then, beneath the still black and impenetrable mass 
of overhanging vapor, the Spirit of God moved upon the 
face of the waters in preparation for the incoming of 
order and life. Meanwhile, the down-pouring of the 
water floods still went on, until at length the time came 
when God said: "Let there be light; and there was 
light." The mass of vapor had so far precipitated its 
darker, grosser elements, had so far been clarified and 
lightened, that for the first time the light of the sun 
could now penetrate to the surface of the earth. And 
so, dim and obscure, like the early dawn of a dark and 
cloudy morning, there was light upon the earth. The day 
was divided from the night, and the long, dismal period 
of the first day of creation came to an end. 

II. The biblical record of the second day is very brief. 
It is in substance simply this. "And God said: Let there 
be a firmament in the midst of the waters to divide the 
waters above from the waters beneath. And it was so ; 
and the evening and the morning were the second day." It 
has seemed to many that this account of the second day 
of creation amounted to nothing at all as a statement of 
actual truth. They have understood it as affirming only, 
in accordance with the ideas of the ancient world, that 



THE CREATION. 1 9 

on the second day God created a solid, crystalline firma- 
ment to uphold the waters of the clouds, and separate 
the heavens from the earth. A very short study will 
show us how wide of the truth this interpretation is ; and 
that this statement, in its comprehensive brevity, is both 
a true and an adequate account of the second stage of the 
great creative work. 

At the end of the first day, the solid globe had been 
formed with its covering of waters ; light had penetrated 
to its surface ; the distinction between day and night 
could be perceived. But the huge mass of poisonous va- 
pors, dense and dark, still closed in heavily upon the 
earth. If there had been eye to see, vision would have 
been impossible, except of objects near at hand. Of vi- 
tal air, in which any living thing could breathe or exist, 
as yet there was none. But the slow course of ages wore 
on until at last the second day came to an end, and then 
all was changed. God had placed a firmament in the heav- 
ens to divide the waters above from the waters below. 
And if at that point of time there had been a man upon 
the earth to observe, he would have looked up, just as we 
do now upon a dark and rainy day, through a true atmos- 
phere, in some degree transparent and clear, to the over- 
arching clouds above. Now, as the grand panoramic 
vision passed before the mental eye of the writer of this 
chapter, and he saw a clear, transparent atmosphere form- 
ing itself about the earth, how else could he describe this 
great fact of the second day, than in the language he has 
used ? In common with all his contemporaries, he fully 
believed in a solid, crystalline firmament. He knew noth- 
ing of the air as a ponderable, elastic fluid, upholding the 
weight of the clouds. He knew of no other way to de- 
scribe the great change of the second day than as the crea- 
tion of the firmanent to uphold the clouds and the stars, 
and to separate the heavens from the earth. 



20 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

Other changes vast and numberless had meantime 
been going on, to which no reference is here made. But, 
as the biblical account truly implies, the one grand, essen- 
tial feature in the work of this second day of creation 
was the formation of an atmosphere, the necessary con- 
dition of life to all the orders of living things which after- 
ward, in long succession, were to have their home upon 
the earth. It was an atmosphere as yet very imperfect 
and impure, in which probably no lung-breathing animal 
of the present day could have lived an hour. The sur- 
face of the ground was still not only warm but hot. 
Evaporation from the face of the waters was rapid and 
immense. The mass of vapor still hung dark and heavy 
over the earth, and a constant deluge of rain was still 
poured upon its surface. But an atmosphere had been 
formed ; the world was ready for life. Life in its low- 
est forms had in fact already begun ; and long before 
the end of this period multitudes of living things, both 
vegetable and animal, were peopling the deep waters 
of the sea, and the marshes and shallows upon its bor- 
ders. And so the evening and the morning were the 
second day. 

III. We may regard the second day as commencing 
with the slates, and including what are known, in geologi- 
cal language, as the Cambrian and Lower Silurian periods. 
The third day will then include the Upper Silurian, the 
Devonian or Old Red Sandstone, and the Carboniferous 
or Coal periods. On the third day, we are told, God 
said : " Let the dry land appear, and let the earth bring 
forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit-tree, 
whose seed is in itself, after his kind." Of the essential 
truth of this statement, no intelligent man can doubt. 
The higher order of plants and trees, it is true, did not 
appear at this early age. But that an enormous growth 



THE CREATION. 21 

of grass and herb and tree, including pines, did then 
flourish upon the earth, is one of the most familiar of 
scientific facts. Nearly all the immense deposits of coal 
over all the globe were laid down countless ages ago 
in this third day of creation. And the miner of to-day 
as he brings to the light the hidden characters of this 
ancient writing of the finger of God, can point out the 
perfect impress of the plants and leaves, the stems, stalks, 
and tree-trunks of that enormous vegetation which was 
called into being on this third day of the Creator's work. 
It was on this third day that God said : " Let the dry land 
appear." In these words we have the statement of a great 
geological fact. Down to the end of the Silurian period, 
geologists tell us that but little dry land comparatively, 
some narrow and unstable continents, a few islands here 
and there in the all-covering ocean, had as yet appeared. 1 
In the Devonian period these islands were greatly multi- 
plied, their surface greatly extended. In the succeeding 
or Carboniferous age, the islands grew to widely extended 
continents, covering a considerable portion of the earth's 
surface. It seems probable that it was not so much 
over the vast, soilless expanses of these new continents, 
as upon the wide-spreading flats and marshes upon the 
borders of the sea, that there sprung up and flourished 
for ages, that incredibly rank and wide-spread vegetation 
which has been preserved to our day in the form of 
coal. 

IV. On the fourth day, the record proceeds, God 
said : " Let there be lights in the firmament of heaven to 
divide the day from the night ; and let them be for signs, 
and for seasons, and for days, and years. And God 
made two great lights : the greater light to rule the day, 

1 "The surface of the earth (in the Upper Silurian) was a surface of great 
waters, with the continents only in embryo — one large area and some 
islands representing that of North America, and an archipelago that of Eu- 
rope." — Dana's " Geology," p. 183. 



22 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

and the lesser light to rule the night. He made the stars 
also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven 
to give light upon the earth." 

This part of the scriptural statement needs to be care- 
fully and particularly considered ; because in the record 
of the Creator's work on the fourth day has been found 
the great and seemingly insuperable difficulty in the in- 
terpretation of the first chapter of Genesis. This record 
has been understood as declaring that on the fourth day 
God created the sun, moon, and stars ; while it is cer- 
tain that they had been shining on in their places as long 
as the earth itself had existed in the form of a solid 
globe. Principal Dawson tells us that away back in the 
Primordial or Cambrian period, that is, in the middle 
ages of the second day of creation, in the shrinkage 
cracks, formed, as they are formed still, by the intense 
heat of the sun on the soft and yielding mud, but 
which in this instance afterward hardened into the Cam- 
brian rocks, we see clear indications that the sun was 
then shining on the earth, just as it shines to-day. 1 

The difficulties of this passage have seemed very great ; 
but we can now see that they are only in seeming, and 
that in reality we have in these verses an account, which 
is entirely and exactly correct, of what was the most im- 
portant feature of the fourth great stage of the Creator's 
work ; remembering only that the story is told as by a 
human observer, watching the unfolding order of events 
from the surface of the earth. And now, in the first 
place, let us observe that there is no intimation in these 
verses that on the fourth day God created the sun 
and the moon. What is said is simply this : On the 
fourth day God said : Let tJiere be lights in the firmament 
of the earth. We are indeed told that on this day God 

1 " Story of the Earth and Man," p. 48. 



THE CREATION. 23 

made the stars ; but the stars, we must remember, ac- 
cording to this writer's ideas, were not worlds or spheres, 
but only twinkling lights. All that his language means 
is, that on the fourth day God placed these twinkling 
lights in our firmament, made them visible from the sur- 
face of the earth. 

And now let us observe again, that in telling us that 
the shrinkage cracks of the old Cambrian age were 
caused by the heat of the sun, the geologists are strangely 
forgetful of their own facts. A loaf of bread will bake 
just as fast by heat from below, as by heat from above ; 
and untold years after the Cambrian age, in the great 
Coal period of the third day of creation, the internal 
heat of the earth was still so intense as to bake our 
anthracite coal from common peat into that glassy stone 
with which we are so familiar. 1 In the Cambrian age, 
the surface of the ground was not only warm, but hot ; so 
that, in every considerable intermission of the ever- 
pouring rains, by the internal heat of the earth alone, 
the rapidly drying mud would parch and crack. At 
that early period, a transparent atmosphere was but just 
beginning to form itself under the mass of vapors which 
always hung, huge and dark, over the earth. Through 
that impenetrable covering, during all the ages of the 
Cambrian period, it seems very certain that the sun 
never shone. More than this. From the character of 
the life which filled the earth all through the Coal period, 
and the extent of its semi-tropical vegetation, stretch- 
ing northward, as it did, beyond the Arctic Circle, it is clear 
that down even to the close of that period, the air was 
still loaded with impurities and with the mass of vapor 
ever ascending from the warm and steaming earth. We 

1 All through the Carboniferous period the internal heat of the earth was 
so great that there was no perceptible difference in climate between the 
equator and the poles. — Dana's " Geology," p. 231, 



24 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

may affirm with all confidence that down to the end of 
the Coal period, and of the third day of creation, the 
overarching firmament of clouds was never broken, that 
the eye of no living thing upon the earth had ever seen 
either sun, or moon, or stars. 

But with the fourth day there came a change. At 
length the last stage of the long process by which, 
through so many ages, the earth had been prepared to 
be the abode of the highest orders of created things 
was complete. The atmosphere below was cleared and 
purified ; the ancient arch of clouds was broken and dis- 
pelled ; and, for the first time in all her history, the sun, 
moon, and stars looked brightly down upon the smiling 
earth. God had set them for lights in the firmament of 
heaven to be thenceforth for signs, and for seasons, and 
for days, and years. 

V. and VI. The world was now ready for new and 
higher forms of life. Accordingly, we are told that on 
the fifth day God said : " Let the waters bring forth 
abundantly every thing that moveth in the waters " ; also, 
that on this day he created great sea-monsters and every 
kind of fowl. On the sixth day quadrupeds were created 
in all their many families, and finally, man himself. 

Now the point to be especially noted in this connection 
is this. No philosopher of the present day could write a 
brief statement of the unfolding of the great system of 
animal life upon our globe through these two great 
periods, each of them hundreds of thousands of years 
in duration, more perfectly true, more scientifically 
exact, than the account given us in these few verses of 
the first chapter of Genesis. 

Geologists divide the history of life on this planet into 
three periods : the Palaeozoic, or Ancient Life ; the Mes- 
ozoic, or Middle Life ; and the Neozoic, or Recent Life. 



THE CREATION. 2$ 

The Palaeozoic period includes the latter part of the sec- 
ond day, and the third and fourth days of Genesis ; the 
Mesozoic corresponds to the fifth day ; and the Neozoic 
to the sixth day. In the Palaeozoic period, during which 
there is in Genesis no reference to the creation of any 
living thing, there was, in fact, a vast development of ani- 
mal life. Innumerable creatures, all of them low and 
coarse in type, but many of them monstrous and terrible 
in form, swam in the waters, or crawled upon the mud of 
that ancient world. But here comes in a strange fact, 
and a fact exactly in accordance with the record in Gen- 
esis. In the fourth day, in what geologists call the Per- 
mian age, the age immediately following the great Coal 
formation, the continents of the Carboniferous period 
settled again beneath the waters, and the ocean once 
more covered almost the whole surface of the globe. In 
this age, through the great disturbances which took place 
in all the crust of the globe, and the filling of the water 
and the air with poisonous gases, almost all these earlier 
forms of life — the sharks and a few others still survived — 
disappeared, leaving a comparatively empty world for the 
new and higher forms of life now to be introduced. 

And now, turn to any geological table of the successive 
forms of life through these two great periods, the Meso- 
zoic of the fifth day and the Neozoic of the sixth day, 
and you will find it but a mere amplification of these 
verses of the first chapter of Genesis. All the kinds of 
fishes which now swim in our waters ; oysters, lobsters, 
crabs, and all the forms of shell-fish ; infinite varieties of 
insect life; great reptiles and sea-monsters of many differ- 
ent kinds, most of which had ceased to exist before the 
end of the fifth day; and, finally, many different species 
of birds ; — all these were brought forth abundantly in 
the Mesozoic period the fifth day of the Creator's work. 



26 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

And then in the Neozoic age, the sixth day of crea- 
tion, appeared the highest form of animal life, including 
man ; — the vast and various family of the mammalia ; 
that is, animals of every class and order which suckle 
their young. Thus was the Creator's work at last accom- 
plished. The vast cycles of time through which it had 
been so long and so slowly unfolding were complete, and 
the evening and the morning were the sixth day. 

And now, in conclusion, I have this to say: On any 
other hypothesis than that of divine inspiration, this first 
chapter of Genesis, and in particular this account of the 
fifth and sixth days of creation, is the most unaccountable 
production ever written by the pen of man. Consider 
by whom this chapter was written. It was written by a 
man who lived far back in the early infancy of human 
knowledge; a man who had not, and could not have, any 
knowledge whatever, any least conception or suspicion, 
of the actual reality of the vast development of which he 
was telling the story. And yet, of that development, 
going on through countless ages, he has followed the order 
of events in a full and comprehensive outline ; an outline 
so true and exact, that not one mistake or defect can be 
pointed out in it from beginning to end. How could 
such a thing be ? How did this man know that a robe 
of waters covered the earth before a ray of light from the 
sun had penetrated to its surface? How did this man 
know that the enormous vegetation of the Coal period 
had flourished two and three of the great creative days 
before the higher animals were called into being ? How 
did he know that it was not until the fourth day that the 
sun shone clearly upon the earth ? How did he know 
that fish of every kind, gigantic reptiles, and birds filled 
the earth on the fifth day, while the mammalia, and man, 



THE CREATION. 2J 

the crown of all, were not called into being until the 
sixth day, at the very close of the long creative work ? 
Clearly, he wrote better than he knew. Some vision of 
the grand evolution of material things passed before 
his mental eye, and the story of creation, as he thus saw 
it, he has told. Science examines this story, and finds it 
true and exact in every point. What shall we say of a, 
record like this, dating back to the very childhood of our 
race, yet so strangely anticipating the maturest results of 
scientific investigation ? There is but one thing which 
can be said, a judgment which we are compelled to repeat 
with every new examination of the sacred volume: All 
Scripture is given by inspiration of God. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE UNITY OF LIFE. 

IN considering the nature of man, and his relation to 
the other orders of animal life, there are several points to 
be noted. Taking them in their proper order, we may 
observe — 

I. — Man is closely related, both physically and mentally, 
to the higher classes of vertebrate animals. 

His physical nature is strictly analogous to theirs. It 
does not display a single tissue, bone, muscle, nerve or- 
gan, or material element, nor a single vital process or 
function, in which it does not exactly correspond to theirs. 
He has the same appetites, desires, and passions. Like 
them he thinks, remembers, reasons, wills, and acts 
through the instrumentality of a brain and nervous sys- 
tem. Like them he lives, feeds, enjoys, and reproduces 
his kind ; and like them he suffers and dies. Excepting 
only his intellectual and moral powers, there is not a sin- 
gle point in either his physical or his mental nature, in 
which he is not closely related to the higher vertebrate 
animals. 

But this is not all ; for — 

II. — We have reason to believe that all animal life is one 
and the same. 

Comparative anatomy and embryology have taught us 
that all the forms of animal life are bound together by 
the same close relationship which exists between man and 
the higher vertebrates. All living creatures have their 

28 



THE UNITY OF LIFE. 29 

common starting-point in an egg, and pursue a common 
course of development until they branch into the four 
great divisions of the Radiates, Mollusks, Articulates, and 
Vertebrates. In our own order of the Vertebrates, we 
find all the forms of life bound together in the strictest 
unity of development. We are taught that the bodies of 
all vertebrate animals are formed upon the same pattern ; 
that the swim-bladder of the fish and the lung of the 
land-animal are modifications of the same organ ; as are 
the flipper of the seal and the foreleg of the reptile and 
the horse, the wing of the bird and the arm of man. 
We are taught that the close relation of every form of 
vertebrate life to other forms, below but nearest to itself, 
is seen, not only in important structural affinities, but in 
the presence of rudimentary organs, no longer useful, 
but which have been and still are useful in the lower 
forms, and which still retain their place, though without 
function, under the changed conditions of life. 

The truth we are now considering appears yet more 
strikingly in the history of the development of every ver- 
tebrate organism. We are taught that the embryo of the 
reptile, the bird, the seal, the dog, and of man himself are 
so closely similar in their early stages, that unless in size 
they can scarcely be distinguished one from another ; and 
that it is only as the embryo approaches its perfect form 
that it takes on the peculiar features of its own type of 
life. And just as the newt is at first a fish, with perfect 
gills, before it attains to its amphibian form as a walking, 
lung-breathing animal, so we are taught that every higher 
vertebrate animal passes through, in the course of its de- 
velopment, the forms of life directly below itself. This 
truth appears most clearly in man himself. For it is 
shown that the human embryo has at first the heart, 
kidneys, and gill-arches of a fish ; that* as the vertebral 



30 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

column becomes developed, the vertebrae of the os coc- 
cyx are free and greatly prolonged, forming a true tail ; 
and that still later, the foetus is covered with a woolly 
down or fur, corresponding to the hair which covers the 
lower animals at birth. 

Now if we conceive of a young newt, gill-breathing, 
and swimming in the water, as stopped in its progress 
toward the amphibian form, and made to mature into a 
proper fish, we shall have an illustration of what seems 
to be true of all vertebrate life inferior to man. It is im- 
possible to resist the conviction that all vertebrate life is 
one ; and that all forms of vertebrate life below man 
are but cases of arrested development ; that all these 
forms set forth from one starting-point, by a common 
pathway, for the same end ; but that each form is stopped 
at its own proper point upon the common highway, 
turned aside to pursue for a greater or less distance the 
by-path of its own specific development, and so made to 
mature in a lower and imperfect state. 

But, if this is true of the many and widely varying 
forms of vertebrate life, it is equally true of all animal 
life. For Radiates, Mollusks, Articulates, and Verte- 
brates all have the same starting-point, and are all alike 
until they branch off from the common pathway, to pur- 
sue each its appointed line of development. We may, 
therefore, accept it as truth that all animal life is one. 

III. — We have reason to believe that throughout the ani- 
mal kingdom, including man, all mind is one and the 
same. 

In comparing man to the lower animals in respect to 
his mental nature, we are struck first by the greatness of 
his difference from and superiority to them, and then, 
on the other hand, by the closeness of his relationship 
with them. In his intellectual, moral, and spiritual pow- 



THE UNITY OF LIFE. 3 1 

ers and capabilities, the distance by which man is re. 
moved from the lower animals is simply immeasurable. 
He lives in a higher sphere, to a nobler end, and clearly 
belongs to another order of being. 

He is an intellectual being, as the lower animals are 
not. By this we mean that he has the power of general- 
izing his conceptions and forming abstract ideas ; of elabo- 
rating a system of words to represent and communicate 
those ideas ; and, by means of these symbols, of pursuing 
long-continued and far-reaching processes of thought; 
that he can observe facts, accumulate knowledge, rise by 
the powers of his own reason from known truth to 
higher and more general truths, and make the truths so 
ascertained the basis of his action. 

He is a moral being, as the lower animals are not. By 
this we mean that he is able to forecast the consequences 
of his conduct ; to understand a definite law of right and 
wrong; to judge the acts of himself and others by that 
law as right or wrong ; that he is under conscious ob- 
ligation to do the right and avoid the wrong ; and that 
he is capable, by his own free volitions, of fulfilling this 
obligation. 

Above all, he is a spiritual being, as the lower ani- 
mals are not. His nature is the image of the divine. 
He is capable of sympathy, fellowship, and the most in- 
timate filial relations with his Creator. Endowed with 
powers capable of indefinite improvement and expan- 
sion, he can set before himself as his standard and goal 
the infinite perfections of the divine nature ; and ever 
advancing toward that high ideal, he may rise forever into 
a nearer and nearer likeness to the perfect and divine. 

Such is the measureless distance by which man is 
raised above the lower animals. And now, on the other 
hand, -let us consider how closely related is his mental 



32 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

nature to theirs. His nature and theirs alike are com- 
pound existences, made up of body and mind. His 
mind and theirs alike act through, can only act through, 
are strictly limited by, their material organs, the brain 
and nerves. The brain of man and the higher animals, 
which in every animal is both the instrument and the 
measure of mental activity and power, is generically and 
identically the same. There is no part, organ, function, 
or connecting nerve in the human brain, which is not 
found, germinally at least, in the brain of the elephant, the 
ape, and the dog. This identity of brain is positive proof 
of the identity of mind in man and the higher animals, 
so far as these different orders of mind are open to our 
observation and comparison. He and they have the 
same senses, and derive through these senses, in the same 
way, all their primitive ideas. He and they alike per- 
ceive, feel, love, hate, fear, hope, remember, reflect, rea- 
son, and decide ; and alike they act by free, spontaneous 
volition. In short, in the mental nature of man there is 
not one element, of either faculty or action, which is not 
found, at least germinally, in the higher animals. In 
every respect their mental constitution and action are 
like those of man, only upon a smaller and lower scale. 
At what point, then, begins the wide divergence, and 
upon what does that divergence depend ? It begins with, 
and depends upon, the ability of man, and the inability of 
the animal, to form abstract ideas. Men and animals alike 
perceive external objects, form simple ideas of those ob- 
jects in the concrete, and reason upon them. Beyond 
this point the animal, with his small, imperfect brain, 
cannot go. No abstract idea, as of heat or cold, friend- 
ship or enmtiy, justice or injustice, is ever formed in his 
mind ; and by this one fact he is shut up to a mental 
sphere exceedingly small and low. 



THE UNITY OF LIFE. 33 

But the large and comparatively perfect brain of man 
endows him with far higher powers. He can observe a 
thousand things which pass unnoticed by the duller mind 
of the animal. He observes not only external objects, 
but his own mental states and acts, and those of other 
men. He notes cause and effect in the sequence of 
events, and is thus enabled and led to calculate the con- 
sequences of his conduct. He perceives the relations 
which things and acts bear to one another. Thus he 
forms abstract conceptions of love and hatred, friendship 
and enmity, time, space, distance, and a thousand other 
things which have no place in the thought of the animal. 
To these abstract conceptions his ingenuity in express- 
ing his emotions and ideas — a power not peculiar to him, 
but possessed in a lower degree by many of the higher 
animals — enables him to give names and symbolic ex- 
pression in the forms of speech. And upon these larger 
conceptions, and on this grander scale, he reasons as, in 
their smaller way, the higher animals reason upon their 
few and concrete ideas. Thus, by this one power of 
forming abstract conceptions, and using them in his 
mental processes as he uses his simpler and concrete ideas, 
is man raised immeasurably above all other forms of 
animal life, and made an intellectual being. 

And this, same power makes him also a moral being. 
He soon perceives that vice, falsehood, ingratitude, and 
cruelty are degrading to his nature and destructive to 
human well-being ; and as he perceives this truth, the 
voice of his reason is heard pronouncing these things 
evil. He perceives that kindness, fidelity, truth, and 
purity ennoble his nature and promote the welfare of all 
men ; and again the voice of his reason is heard pro- 
nouncing these things good. Thus does he attain to the 
grand ideas of good and evil. And then, as he reflects 



34 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

upon these ideas, and his judgment approves the good 
and condemns the evil, there rises before his mind a 
grander conception, the conception of the law of right ; 
a law which, by the constitution of his nature, he is 
bound to obey. The moment this law is perceived and 
acknowledged, man stands erect in his noblest endowment, 
a moral being. 

And when, in addition to all that he can observe and 
discover by his own unaided powers, he receives a divine 
revelation ; is taught the being, character, and law of God, 
and his own immortality and likeness to the divine 
nature ; is taught that he can rise into sympathy and 
fellowship with his Creator ; is taught to take as the 
standard of his own attainment the high ideal of infinite 
perfection ; when he has received this divine revelation, 
has accepted the truth, and bowed reverently to the law 
thus revealed, and has begun his long struggle upward 
toward the divine ideal before him, then the highest 
powers of his nature unfold, and he stands the true 
image of God, an intellectual, moral, and spiritual being. 

But in all this intellectual, moral, and spiritual develop- 
ment of man, there is no departure from, there is only 
the grand unfolding of, the simple type of animal life. 
This was the germ, that is the spreading tree, but no new 
element has been added. Man is an intellectual being, 
and the animals below him are not. But they have ob- 
servation, memory, reflection, reason, judgment, all the 
germs of an intellectual nature, in them forever unde- 
veloped and impossible. Man is a moral being, and the 
animals below him are not. But in them is seen the per- 
fect germ of that moral nature so grandly unfolded in 
man. The essential element of morality is submissive 
deference to acknowledged authority and the law of 
right. But let it be observed that man is divine to the 



THE UNITY OF LIFE. 35 

dog, is to him as a god. And in the dog's submissive 
obedience to his master's will, his clear conviction that to 
him that will is the law of right, and his fidelity and de- 
votion to his master, there is certainly to be seen the true 
germ of a moral nature. Man is a spiritual being, as the 
animal is not. But when we observe the ardent affection 
of the dog for his master, his obedience to his will, his 
longing for his master's society, and eager delight in the 
tokens of his favor and love, we see just that which be- 
comes religion in man ; just that which in man, developed 
in the fulness of its power, and directed to the Father of 
all, marks the highest unfolding of his nature and makes 
him a spiritual being. 

Wide, immeasurable, as is the interval which separates 
man from the animals below him, the only difference that 
can be pointed out between him and them is in power 
and degree of development. Man is the crown and glory, 
the end, of this grand unfolding of animal life. The in- 
ferior forms of that life are cast in a meaner mould, for a 
transient existence, with narrow powers incapable of ex- 
pansion, and for a subordinate end. But in him and in 
them the type of being is in all points the same ; through- 
out the whole animal kingdom, including man, all mind is 
one. 

IV. — We have reason to believe that every higher form 
of life, including man, has sprung, in part at least, by di- 
rect descent from other and lower forms. 

In no other way can we account for the geological suc- 
cession of species in particular localities ; for the fact 
that the marsupials of Australia, the strange birds of 
New Zealand, the sloth and armadillo of South America, 
should all of them be the successors of other and gigantic 
forms, closely akin to themselves, but long ago extinct. 
In no other way can we account for the absolute identity 



36 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

in type and function of the physical structure of man 
with that of the higher vertebrates below him ; for his 
constant tendency to vary, in many unimportant particu- 
lars, in the direction of those lower forms ; for his rudi- 
mentary organs; and, above all, for his embryological de- 
velopment. By these and many other considerations, 
the conviction seems forced upon us that man is geneti- 
cally connected with the vertebrate forms next below 
himself, and they again with others still lower in the 
scale. 

Of this hypothesis no positive proof has as yet been 
found. As Mr. Agassiz and many others have pointed 
out, and as Mr. Darwin and the naturalists of his school 
do not deny, all the variations which have thus far been 
observed have been strictly limited to specific forms. 
Under the power of natural selection, species vary large- 
ly and constantly. But it is affirmed that in all the his- 
tory of life not one case has been discovered in which we 
can trace the production of a radically distinct form from 
another and lower form by slow and imperceptible stages, 
through the survival of the fittest, and the constant ac- 
cumulation of minute variations. At present, we must 
believe with Mr. Agassiz and other high authorities that, 
however the conditions of life might vary, the great types 
of life have been steadfastly permanent until their final 
extinction; that no evidence can be found of any ten- 
dency in any specific form to become so modified by slow 
and minute variations as to develop from itself another 
and distinct specific form ; and that, as a rule, species 
have appeared suddenly, have attained rapidly to their 
maximum, have flourished for a time without any change 
in their typical character, and then have slowly declined 
and disappeared. 

And yet, so close and vital is the connection between 



THE UNITY OF LIFE. 37 

each species and the preceding species most nearly akin 
to itself, that, for my own part, I cannot resist the con- 
viction that in every case one has sprung from the other 
per saltum, by a sudden leap in advance, by direct de- 
scent. And this vast and systematic evolution of all the 
myriad forms of living things from the primeval germ of 
life, in fulfilment of the purpose of the all-creating God, 
appears to me the highest, sublimest conception we are 
able to form of the creation of animal life. 

One of Mr. Darwin's happiest illustrations is in com- 
paring the development of the great system of life to the 
growth of a spreading tree. The tree shoots from its 
single minute germ, and puts forth its tiny shoot covered 
with leaves. Surrounding conditions in soil and expos- 
ure, moisture and drought, heat and cold, have much to 
do in shaping its future destiny, while, at the same time, 
there is going on a constant struggle for existence within 
itself. For many a bud is formed which never germi- 
nates ; many a leaf and twig die prematurely, and dis- 
appear. And so, under the controlling influence of the 
conditions of life, the struggle for existence, and the 
survival of the fittest, the tree grows and expands, brings 
forth its annual generations of leaves and fruit, and shoots 
higher and higher its ever multiplying branches, no two 
of them like one another, but all sprung from the same 
primitive germ, and all bound together in a common unity 
of development. 

This illustrates very happily Mr. Darwin's view of the 
development of the ever rising, ever varying forms of life, 
under the controlling influence of natural selection. But 
it illustrates with far greater force a deeper and more fun- 
damental truth which Mr. Darwin has passed over in 
silence. For, this tree, through all its spreading and long 
enduring growth, to the minutest particular in its struct- 



38 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

ure and development, to the figure and arrangement of 
every leaf, to the shape and color of every fruit, was 
given, with absolute pre-determination, in the germ from 
which it sprung. The oak, in every point of its future 
unfolding, is pre-determined in the acorn. And so, ac- 
cording to the pre-conceived plan in the Creator's mind, 
the whole system of nature and of life, through all its 
history, and to the minutest point of its development, — 
to the character of every species, the size and form of 
every animal, the song and plumage of every bird, was 
given, with the like absolute pre-determination, in the 
germ from which it sprung. 

It seems impossible to doubt that the history of life 
has a proper development, a true unfolding, a direct de- 
scent of species from species. Mr. Agassiz holds that 
such an evolution is contrary to the analogies of nature, 
and to all observed facts ; that the only true evolution 
of which we know is the history of the individual organ- 
ism. But had Mr. Agassiz never studied the history of 
mankind ? Certainly there is no more perfect analogy 
than that between the history of the individual man and 
that of the race to which he belongs. No truer evolution 
has ever been traced or imagined than that which marks 
the grand unfoldings of human history. The unity of 
development in the history of the race is just as true and 
perfect as in that of the individual man. But the life of 
the man does not appear to be any more typical of that 
of his race,* than is the history of a single animal organ- 
ism of that of the whole system of animated nature. The 
analogy seems as perfect in the one case as in the other. 
It seems impossible to doubt that there has been an evo- 
lution as true, and a unity of development as complete, 
in the world of nature, as in the world of man. 

But how shall we account for the apparently sudden 



THE UNITY OF LIFE. 39 

introduction of new species? Our illustration of the tree 
may help us to an understanding of the truth upon this 
point, as upon others. The tree has grown for a number 
of years, producing annually its crop of leaves, when, sud- 
denly, there appears among its buds a new form — a bud 
which expands, not into leaves, but into flower and fruit. 
We look upon it, and say : The tree has produced this 
new form at the proper time, and according to the law 
of its development. And doubtless we may say the same 
when we note the new forms which have appeared, one 
after another, upon the tree of life. Nature, in her grand 
unfolding, has produced these forms, each at its proper 
time, either regularly, in accordance with the law of her 
development, or with some interference of the divine 
hand to give a new direction to her spreading growth. 

This point we may see best illustrated in what I think 
we must admit to have been the probable origin of the 
highest and most distinct of all species, man himself. 
We have already seen what cogent reasons we have for 
believing that man is genetically connected with the 
higher vertebrate animals. We may, therefore, with Mr. 
Mivart, interpret the words, " The Lord God formed man 
of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils 
the breath of life," as meaning simply this: that man was 
made to spring from baser pre-existing forms, but en- 
dowed with new and higher powers, which made him an 
intellectual and moral being. According to this view, 
the account to be given of the creation of the first man 
would be as follows : By an abnormal birth, which gave 
him per saltam, at one bound, the brain, hands, feet, up- 
right carriage and naked body of a man, he sprung from 
some pre-existing man-like animal now extinct. Thus he 
stood a man, with full human powers, and capable of 
becoming all that men have since become. 



40 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

But how should this new type be preserved ? If the 
newly-produced man remained associated only with the 
animals from which he sprung, his posterity would at 
once revert to the original stock ; and in a few genera- 
tions not a trace. of his high endowments would remain. 
The Bible tells us how this difficulty was met. For the 
man thus created, and as yet alone, the hand of God 
called into being a female companion, derived from him- 
self, and partaking in every respect of his own nature, 
and thus the type was preserved. By what law, or in 
what way, the other species of animal life were produced, 
we have as yet no knowledge. But, in view of the con- 
siderations now presented, we certainly have reason to 
believe that all the higher forms of life, including man, 
sprung, in part at least, by direct descent, from other and 
pre-existing forms. 

V. — We have reason to believe that throughout the ani- 
mal kingdom, including man, the mind is wholly incapable 
of an active, or even a conscious existence, apart from a 
material organism ; and, therefore, that for all animals be- 
low man there is no immortality of self-conscious existence ; 
that the immortality of man, as an individual, self-conscious 
being, depends entirely upon the resurrection of the body. 

If throughout the animal kingdom all mind is one, it 
follows that whatever of immortality is inherent in man 
by the nature of his being, is equally inherent in the ani- 
mals below him. ' But no man believes in a conscious and 
active immortality for them. They have no promise of 
such a future, either in their own nature, or in revelation. 
And if we examine the matter fairly, we shall see that, 
apart from the resurrection of the body, there is no more 
promise of such a future for us. 

We must first observe, and it is one of the most im- 
portant facts known to us, that in the present life the 



THE UNITY OF LIFE. 4 1 

mind is absolutely dependent upon its material organ, not 
only for all its active powers, but for the consciousness 
of its own existence. In this life, the mind has no con- 
scious existence apart from the brain. The manifestation 
of mind is always just in proportion to the size, perfec- 
tion, and health of the brain. If the brain is imperfect, 
the manifestation of mind is equally imperfect. If the 
brain becomes diseased, the mind loses its power. If 
the disease progresses so far that the structure of the 
brain is destroyed, even while life remains, reason, mem- 
ory, perception, and consciousness itself are wholly lost, 
and the man lies but a breathing corpse. So far as we 
can learn from any thing open to our observation, the 
mind is dead before the body dies. But the mind, in its 
essential nature, is now and always the same. We have 
no reason to suppose that it undergoes any change in its 
character or powers at the death of the body. What it 
is in this life, that it must continue to be as long as it 
exists. 

The second point to be observed is the great truth, 
taught in the New Testament, that the dead shall be 
raised ; that the soul shall recover its material organiza- 
tion, no longer mortal or perishing, but perfected, spirit- 
ualized, and immortal ; so that, through all the eternal 
future, man shall be as now, a compound existence, body 
and soul. 

The third point is, that upon the intermediate state 
between death and the resurrection the Bible gives us 
no light, and no hint; unless it be in expressions like 
that of Saint Paul: "We which are alive, and remain un- 
to the coming of the Lord, shall not prevent them which 
are asleep." 

A fourth point is that, notwithstanding the universal 
belief of the ancient world in the immortality of the soul, 



4 2 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

there is in all the Bible scarcely an allusion to a future 
life, until Christ appears, whose resurrection is to be the 
first promise that all men shall rise. 

The last point to be observed, and perhaps it is the 
most important of all, is the passionate vehemence with 
which Saint Paul clings to this great doctrine of the res- 
urrection of the dead. To him, at least, there is no 
heaven of disembodied spirits. If the dead rise not, then 
is our preaching vain, your faith is vain, we are, of all 
men, most miserable ; let us eat and drink, for to-morrow 
we die. We must, therefore, admit, that neither in reason 
nor in revelation is there any ground for the belief that the 
soul of man is capable of an active and self-conscious ex- 
istence apart from a material organism ; that his con- 
scious and active immortality depends upon the resurrec- 
tion of the body ; and that to the animals below man 
there is no future life, no conscious existence after the 
body dies. 

We have thus gone over, one by one, the great princi- 
ples of what we have reason to accept as truth in respect 
to the creation and development of the world, of nature, 
and of life. As we look back over the ground we have 
traversed, we shall see that all these principles may be 
summed up in three propositions. 

1. There is a personal God, with a nature closely akin 
to our own, who has created all things, and directed the 
unfolding of the system of nature according to a definite 
plan, — a plan preconceived, descending to the minutest 
details, and all-comprehending in its scope. 

2. As this stupendous scheme has unfolded itself, 
new factors or elements have from time to time become 
necessary ; and these have been added or introduced oy 
the supernatural intervention of the Creator's hand. 



THE UNITY OF LIFE. 43 

Examples of this supernatural intervention, two out of 
many, are seen in the creation of our first parents, and 
the revelation of divine truth. 

3. With the exception of these interferences, these 
graftings by the Creator's hand of new and better fruits 
upon the tree of life, the whole history of the animate 
world, from its first germinal beginning to its culmina- 
tion in free and Christian man, has been one grand 
evolution ; the whole system unfolding itself from its 
first simple germ, according to the law of development 
impressed upon it by the power and wisdom of its Crea- 
tor, just as the tree unfolds itself from its seed. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE IMAGE OF THE DIVINE. 

" So God created man in his own image, in the image 
of God created he him." To the Christian, this proposi- 
tion is fundamental. There is hardly another passage in 
all the Bible, in which he rests with more entire confi- 
dence, nor one in which he finds more of comfort and of 
promise as he contemplates the troubles and evils which 
fill society, and the conflict between the right and the 
wrong which is always going on over the world. This 
proposition is the ground of our religion, the ground of 
our patriotism, the ground of our social and political 
philosophy, the ground of all our hope, for our country, 
and for all mankind. It is the full explanation of the 
nature of man, and the key to all the mysteries of his 
history and his destiny. 

The language of this passage we may accept in its 
literal significance. We may understand it as affirming 
and teaching that God made man with an intellectual, 
moral, and spiritual nature like his own nature, as a 
single bucket of sea-water is like the ocean. Or, to illus- 
trate more exactly, let us take a small circle, and, draw- 
ing its radii from the centre to the circumference, like 
the spokes of a wheel, take the spaces enclosed between 
these several lines to represent the several powers and 
attributes of the mind of man. Now if a small circle 
of this kind stands for an ordinary small-minded man, to 
represent one of the intellectual and spiritual giants of 

44 



THE IMAGE OF THE DIVINE. 45 

the race, we have only to enlarge the circle, and lengthen 
its radii. The several lines and divisions of the circle will 
all remain the same as before, except that they are in- 
creased in size. The mind of Newton has no power or 
faculty which does not belong also to the mind of his 
servant, in a degree proportioned to his mental stature. 
Neither is there any quality or attribute in the mind of 
the most vicious and depraved, which is not found also, 
in a different degree, in the mind of the most virtuous 
and holy. In a word, all differences in human nature are 
differences in degree, not in kind. The same circle yet 
further enlarged will represent the exalted nature of 
angels. And we may understand this passage as affirm- 
ing, that if we expand this little human circle and stretch 
out its radii to infinity, we have correctly imaged to our 
thought the being and attributes of the infinite and eter- 
nal One. 

The most perfect evidence I have of my closeness of 
kinship, my likeness of nature, to another man, is my- 
ability perfectly to coordinate myself with him ; to enter 
into all his thoughts, reasonings, feelings, plans, ctivities, 
and achievements with a perfect understanding, a perfect 
sympathy ; so that I feel, and cannot help but feel, that, 
as it respects the essential powers and qualities of his 
nature, all that he is, that I also am. Just the same evi- 
dence I have of my kinship and likeness to the supreme 
Creator and Ruler of all things. Though but a creature 
of a day, weak, dependent, sinful, I can coordinate myself 
with God ; I can read his word, can go through all the 
universe of his works, tracing out his plans, comprehend- 
ing his purposes, following the movement of his mighty 
activities, just as I read the words, and understand the 
plans and operations of my fellow-man. I can enter into 
his thought, can understand his nature and character, his 



4 6 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

requirements and laws, am capable of a perfect sympathy 
with him. I feel and know that such as he is in his 
essential nature, that also am I, as far as the finite can 
be like the infinite, the human like the divine. 

Let us now give a few moments to some illustrations 
of this ability of man to coordinate himself with God, 
to enter into his thoughts and understand his nature, — 
of this kinship of the human with the divine. 

I. As, on the one hand, nothing is more characteristic 
of our humanity than our love of the beautiful, so, on the 
other, nothing is more characteristic of the works of nature 
than the beauty with which God has filled all things, in 
heaven and earth, in air and sea. This surpassing beauty, 
which fills all the realm of nature, Professor Palmer found 
even among the naked and jagged rocks of the Wilder- 
ness of Sinai. " The very nakedness of the rocks," he 
says, " imparts to the scene a grandeur and beauty pecul- 
iarly Its own. For, as there is no vegetation to soften 
down the rugged outlines of the mountains, or conceal 
the nature of their formation, each rock stands out with 
its own distinctive shape and color. ... In some 
valleys, the mountain sides are striped with innumerable 
veins of the most brilliant hue ; thus producing impres- 
sions of color and fantastic design which it is impossible 
to describe. These effects are heightened by the peculiar 
clearness of the atmosphere, and the dazzling brightness 
of the sunlight. . . And thus, with what would 

seem to be the mere skeleton of a landscape, as beautiful 
effects are produced, as if the bare rocks were clad with 
forests and vineyards, or capped with perpetual snows. 
Nature, in short, seems here to show that in her most 
barren and uninviting moods, she can be exquisitely 
beautiful still." 2 

1 " Desert of the Exodus," p. 36. 



THE IMAGE OF THE DIVINE. 47 

As we read passages like this, and look upon scenes 
like that here described, we are made to feel with rever- 
ence and wonder how glorious and how infinitely diverse 
is the beauty which clothes almost every thing that the 
hand of God has made. How wonderful is the beauty 
which covers the face of nature in our own country when 
summer suns flood with golden radiance our fruitful 
plains, and verdant hills, and wood-covered heights, we 
all of us know and deeply feel. But in the realm of 
nature, so vast and infinitely various, neither fruitful verd- 
ure, nor summer suns are needed to produce a ravishing 
beauty which no words can describe. Such a beauty, as 
we have already seen, rests like the smile of God 
upon the rocks of the desert. And as these very words 
were written in the short days of winter, when the cur- 
rents of Nature were frozen in her veins, and all things 
were buried in ice and snow, we looked forth upon a 
scene of such transcendent beauty as could not be sur- 
passed in all the circling months of the year, nor in all 
the regions of the earth, from pole to pole : a golden, 
almost a vernal sun, smiling from mellow and liquid heavens 
upon a scene of the most gorgeous and glittering splendor 
that the eye of man has ever beheld ; every tree, and 
twig, and blade of grass clothed in pure transparent ice, 
and shining in the glorious sunlight as if garnished with 
all the precious stones which glitter in the foundations 
of the New Jerusalem above. There is also a beauty of 
sublimity, as well as of color and brightness ; an awful 
beauty often, but inspiring the true lover of nature with 
a high and solemn joy; — as when the mid-summer tem- 
pest breaks in terrific grandeur over the earth; or the 
furious storms of winter fill the air with eddying snows, 
and heap high their fantastic drifts. The sea too has its 
glorious beauty, as well as the land ; the ancient, un- 



48 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

changing ocean, of which poets have always loved to sing. 
And the darkness has its beauty, its scenes often of per- 
fect, entrancing beauty, no less than the light ; — as when, 
in some quiet evening hour — 

" The night is calm and peaceful, 
And still as still can be, 
And the stars came out to listen 
To the music of the sea "; 

— those constant stars, shining on forever in their un- 
changing splendor, and ever watching with their silent 
eyes the troubled, shifting scenes of this lower world. 

The hand of God has been just as lavish of this uni- 
versal beauty where no eye of man could see it, where 
only his own omniscience could rejoice in it. Flowers and 
birds of richest hues have spangled the earth for ages, 
which no human eye has looked upon ; and many a cav- 
ern, shut up in the very bowels of the earth, is full of the 
beauty of gems and crystalline forms, which no ray of 
light can ever illumine, which no eye but the eye of 
God can ever see. And this beauty, which so fills all the 
realm of Nature, descends far beyond the reach of the 
unaided human eye to the very minutest of all her works. 
The flake of falling snow, placed under the microscope, 
appears crystallized in myriad figures, perfectly symmetri- 
cal in their form and marvellous in their beauty. The 
same wonderful instrument will reveal to our view many 
a form of animal life, so minute that our unaided vision 
could never detect its presence, but in which we behold 
with wonder the same beauty, the same perfection of 
organization, and of form. And so we may say again : 
How glorious, and how infinitely varied, is the beauty 
which clothes every thing that the hand of God has 
made. 



THE IMAGE OF THE DIVINE. 49 

All this beauty serves its end in the divine purposes. 
And yet it is very clear that it is in no wise merely utili- 
tarian. It has not been called into being in the cool, 
calculating purpose to meet and serve some definite end, 
as a man makes for himself a plough or a hoe. More 
and higher than this, as we can clearly see, this beauty 
which God has so lavished through heaven and earth, 
through day and night, through air and sea and solid 
land, is the expression of his own divine nature. In all 
his works, in all that he ever does, he as it were revels in 
beauty ; not from policy and calculation merely, but be- 
cause he loves it and rejoices in it. Now in all this 
beauty which so fills the works of God, there is clearly 
written the same truth which has been set as one of the 
corner-stones of his revealed Word : " In the day that 
God created man, in the likeness of God created he him." 
For this earth is our home. It was made for our habita- 
tion. All this beauty which so fills all things, above, be- 
neath, and around, touches a deep and a powerfully re- 
sponsive chord in our own bosoms. We see it, under- 
stand it, appreciate it, sympathize in it. It kindles in 
our minds a deep and sacred inspiration. We love it and 
rejoice in it as God rejoices in it. According to our 
measure, we imitate it and reoroduce it in our own in- 
ferior works. Go forth into the realm of nature. Open 
your eyes to all these infinitely varying forms of loveli- 
ness and beauty, of grandeur and sublimity. Let them 
enter into your soul and produce upon it their due, their 
full impression. Rise through these visible forms to 
communion with nature's God ; and see if you do not feel, 
and with a vividness and power unknown before, that ail 
these things were made by a kindred Spirit, by a God 
truly and closely akin to yourself ; and that in very truth, 
in the likeness of the God who made these things, you 
vourself are made. 



50 



FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 



II. In the planning, creation, directing, and govern- 
ment of that vast system of things which makes up the 
created universe of matter and mind, I see the action of 
an intellect precisely like my own in its essential nature. 

This system of things is vast and various, almost to 
infinity, and is manifestly the work of an infinite mind. 
Yet in the system as a whole, and in all its details, I find 
myself perfectly at home. It has been planned exactly 
like the smaller enterprises in which I am engaged. I 
can enter into the plan with full understanding and in- 
telligence. I can trace, with minute and scientific exact- 
ness, the several stages of its accomplishment. I can 
understand the methods and instrumentalities employed. 
Light, heat, electricity, magnetism, all the forces and 
agencies by which the stupendous work is carried on, I 
can not only study and understand in their nature and 
operations ; I can penetrate their secrets, and follow them 
through all their subtle metamorphoses to their elemental 
nature. 

The system of created things is full of mysteries, 
which at present I cannot explain. But excepting the 
impenetrable secret of the nature of life, if it is indeed 
impenetrable, I feel that almost all these mysteries, it 
may be all of them, are such to me, not because I am 
not capable of searching them out and explaining them, 
but simply from my present narrowness of view and im- 
perfection of knowledge. Much that was once mysteri- 
ous and unexplainable, I now clearly understand. And 
if I shall ever attain to a point of observation high enough, 
and to a view broad enough and clear enough, to enable 
me to survey the whole scheme of things in all its history, 
in all its breadth and length, I cannot help believing that 
there is nothing in it, either as a whole, or in any of its 
parts, which I shall not be able to study out and under- 
stand. 



THE IMAGE OF THE DIVINE. 5 I 

So, too, I find myself able to enter into and compre- 
hend the purposes of the Divine Mind. All the ends, 
both mediate and ultimate, of the system as a whole, 
and of its several parts and processes, I feel that I am 
capable of seeing and understanding. Thus, in all things 
I can enter into and understand the operations of the 
Divine Intellect, just as I enter into and understand the 
intellectual operations of my fellow-man. I feel that to 
another man I am closely akin ; that his intellect and 
mine are, in nature, precisely the same. Just the same 
thing I feel as I study the plans, purposes, and operations 
of the infinite Creator and Ruler of all things. I can co- 
ordinate my intellect with his ; I see and know that in 
their essential nature they are the same. 

III. The same truth is taught us just as c.early and 
forcibly by every other manifestation of his nature which 
God has ever made to our knowledge. In the revelation 
of his Word he has made known to us no characteristic 
of his nature more clearly and impressively than his es- 
sential, immutable, eternal righteousness. He is of purer 
eyes than to behold iniquity ; justice and judgment are 
the habitation of his throne. Purity, right, truth, are in 
harmony with his being; dear and delightful to him, 
like the glorious beauty with which he has so filled 
heaven and earth. His soul loves them and rejoices in 
them. And so, on the other hand, all impurity and false- 
hood, all wickedness and wrong, are repugnant to his nat- 
ure, are odious and loathsome in his sight. 

This is the moral nature of God, and there is no man, 
however wicked and depraved, who does not feel, to the 
very depths of his being, that in this respect also his own 
nature is the image of the divine. Eagerly as he may 
run in the way of evil, he knows that he was not made 
for sin and sinning, but for righteousness and holiness. 



52 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

He knows that he was made to love and rejoice in purity 
and right and truth, as God loves and rejoices in them ; 
to hate and abhor wickedness and evil, even as God ab- 
hors them. He knows that his wickedness is not the 
native characteristic of his being, but its disease, its dis- 
tortion, its moral destruction. Physically, we are so 
made as to love and long for wholesome food; to look 
upon it with strong desire, to feed upon it with keenest 
appetite and relish. It is only disease which destroys this 
healthy appetite. The sick man turns often with loath- 
ing from the most tempting food ; but his disease once 
healed, his strong appetite for food returns. So it is with 
our moral nature. We are made to love and do the right, 
to long for and rejoice in the truth. And even when 
long sinning has diseased and enfeebled our souls, and, 
like the Apostle, we find a law in our members which 
seems to force us to all manner of wrong-doing, our in- 
most spiritual consciousness still remains as true as 
the needle to the pole, ever testifying against the 
wrong, ever approving and sustaining the right and the 
true. And when this deadly disease is healed, when our 
moral health is restored, and our souls once more stand 
erect in the fulness of health and soundness as God made 
them and meant them to be, then all this love of wrong, 
all this indifference or dislike to truth and righteousness 
has passed away ; and we find how true it is that our un- 
perverted nature loves all that is right, and pure, and true 
as God loves it ; hates, as God hates it, all that is evil 
and wrong. And then, drawn into perfect and ever- 
lasting sympathy with a holy God, filled with admiration 
and love for the infinite beauty and goodness of his 
character, and copying his divine excellences in our poor 
humanity, we feel how close and intimate is the tie which 
binds us to him, and that our nature is indeed the image 
of the divine. 



THE IMAGE OF THE DIVINE. 53 

Yet more clearly, if such a thing be possible, God has 
revealed to us the same truth when he taught us to look 
up to him and say : " Our Father which art in heaven " ; 
and that in no other way can we obtain so true a concep- 
tion of his relations to us, as from our feelings and rela- 
tions to the children which have been born from ourselves. 
Upon every true child is stamped the impress of his 
father's likeness ; and we are the children of God. When 
we have learned to say with John, " Now are we the 
sons of God," we can doubt no more. We are joined to 
Christ, living branches of him, the living vine. But Christ 
and the Father are one. With Christ we are the sons of 
God. And so, Christ in us, and the Father in him, we 
are all, Father and sons, " made perfect in one," joined 
together in everlasting unity, our humanity then clearly 
manifest as the true image of the divine. 



CHAPTER V. 

THE FIRST FAMILY. 

THE early chapters of the book of Genesis were in- 
tended to give the world some correct idea of the origin 
of the human race, and of its moral history through the 
long period from the Creation to the Flood. More than 
this could not well have been given. So far, at least, as 
human sources of information were concerned, the social 
and political history of the times before the Flood, so far 
as there had been any such history, had been, in great 
measure, lost beyond recovery. Through all the long 
period, certainly many hundreds of years, probably many 
thousands of years, between Adam and Noah, the whole 
race seems to have lived on in the simplicity of its early 
childhood : without settled forms of government, with- 
out social organization, without written records, or any 
knowledge of letters. The generation of Abraham could 
thus know but very little of its ancestors before the Flood ; 
and probably there was very little in what men generally 
would call the history of those times that would have 
been worth the knowing, even if the knowledge of it had 
been preserved. The social and political history of the 
world began with Noah. In these respects, all before 
him is as complete a blank as are the first three years of 
a child in his later memory. 

But with the moral history of our race the case is very 
different. That history began with the first beginning 
of the life of man. Its very earliest chapters are of the 

54 



THE FIRST FAMILY. 55 

highest interest and importance ; and a Bible assuming 
to unfold in all its completeness the great plan of a divine 
Providence in the affairs of this world, must of necessity 
begin with the creation of the race with which that plan 
is concerned. It must give us the first stages of that 
moral history, so dark and troublous yet so full of prom- 
ise, the higher and grander scenes of which begin to open 
before us at the calling of Abraham. This, in these open- 
ing chapters of Genesis, it does, and 'with such clearness 
and fulness as to leave nothing to be desired. Let us 
now give a few moments to the careful study of this 
grand introduction not more to the Bible than to the 
whole history of our race. 

There is scarcely another sentence in all the Bible more 
interesting, or more significant, than that with which this 
human history begins : " And God said let us make man 
in our image, after our likeness." So man was made 
in the image of God. Of the dust of the earth the divine 
Artificer formed his material, perishable, mortal frame, 
but into this material body he breathed the breath of 
life, and man became a living soul ; — a living soul, im- 
mortal as his divine original, and endowed with ail faculties 
and attributes akin to his. And no sooner had man been 
made than woman was given him, bone of his bone, flesh 
of his flesh, to be his life-long companion, the co-parent 
with him of all the race of man. Thus, in close connec- 
tion, the first two steps of the great creative and provi- 
dential work in human history had been taken. Man 
had been made in the image of God ; and in the joining 
together of man and woman as husband and wife the 
family had been instituted, to be the fruitful germ of all 
the social and all the political developments of the coming 
thousands of years of human history. 

And now let us look at these first progenitors of our 



56 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

race, and try to form some true idea of what they were 
and how they were circumstanced. In whatever way 
Adam was first called into being, it is clear that when he 
awoke after Eve's creation, the pair must have opened 
their eyes upon each other, and upon the world around 
them, exactly like two new-born children. They had as 
yet neither language, nor knowledge, nor thought, nor 
any activity of mind. But the divine Father who had 
given them their being was with them to help and teach 
them, and ere long their latent powers of mind began to 
stir within them. They began to look forth with curious 
eyes upon external things, to get some vague idea of the 
world into which they had come, and to develop the first, 
simplest germs of thought, of knowledge, and of speech. 
This was the state of innocence in which our first parents 
lived before their first transgression. As yet they had 
not sinned, just as the new-born infant does not sin, 
simply because they did not know enough to sin. They 
had not, and could not have, any conception of moral 
relations, or moral responsibility, or of the law of right 
and wrong, the law of God. 

But as time passed on their powers of mind unfolded 
until they were ready for the first steps of their moral 
education and training. And just as we begin with our 
little children, so God began with them. He laid upon 
them one very simple command, so simple that they 
could not help but understand it, and told them that that 
command they must obey, or suffer severe punishment 
for their sin. It is strange how much has been written 
and believed upon this matter for which there is not the 
slightest ground in the Scriptures or in fact. The Adam 
and Eve of Milton's " Paradise Lost ' are impossible 
characters, which never did, and never could exist. If we 
are willing to follow and accept the scriptural account of 



THE FIRST FAMILY. $7 

this most important transaction, we shall see that it was 
simply this : God says to them, in effect: I am God. I 
have made you, and made the earth in which you live, 
and given you all that you possess and enjoy, and you 
must love and obey me. This beautiful garden I give 
you freely for your home, I give you all its fruits for your 
food, with this one exception : this tree of knowledge in 
the midst of the garden must be sacred from your hands. 
You must not taste the fruit or touch the tree. If you 
break this command you shall surely die. 

Like other gentle and well-disposed children, our first 
parents seem to have received this command with 
cheerful acquiescence. It stirred no spirit of rebellion in 
their hearts, and they seem to have had no other thought 
than to obey. But faithful, steadfast obedience in the 
face of strong temptation to disobey ;' bowing their wills 
in submission to a higher will, was something which they 
had never learned, — something which, like all children, 
they could only learn by discipline and painful experi- 
ence. No doubt God expected, just as we expect in the 
case of our children, that his command would be dis- 
obeyed, and laid it upon them chiefly that it might 
furnish a needed opportunity for the first painful, but 
most salutary lesson in the long moral training of man- 
kind. The temptation came, and with true childish 
fickleness they yielded to its first solicitation. They 
plucked, they ate, they sinned. 

And then, not in wrath, but in tender love, their 
gracious Father laid upon them the punishment for their 
sin ; a gentle chastisement, a most profitable and health- 
ful discipline, worth more a thousand times to them, and 
to all the generations of their children, than the garden 
of Eden with all its beauties, its idle, aimless delights. 
He pronounced upon them the doom which, although 



58 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

they did not know it, was already written in the very 
substance of their gross material frames, and which to 
the pious mind is not a curse, but an unspeakable bless- 
ing — " Dust ye are, and unto dust ye shall return" ; and 
with this doom he sent them forth to till in sorrow and 
weariness the ground from which they were taken. To 
Adam and Eve this must have been a very bitter and 
terrible experience. And yet it was an experience fraught 
with incalculable good to all the race of mankind. They 
went forth from the garden ashamed, humiliated, con- 
science-stricken, and full of woe. But in their moral 
progress they had made a prodigious stride, had risen to 
far higher and better ground. They were no longer, 
morally, infants of a year old, not knowing enough to sin. 
When they went forth from the garden, there was in 
their minds, in the midst of all their woe, a deep, thor- 
ough, and abiding sense of moral character and responsi- 
bility which neither they nor their children have ever 
lost. And in the hard necessity which drove them to 
their unwonted toils, was found the stimulus to that un- 
ceasing effort which has proved the fruitful mother of all 
those grand activities which have since so adorned and 
enriched the world. So begins the story, long and pain- 
ful, but from the beginning full of promise, and growing 
ever brighter with hope, of human sin and suffering, 
weariness and toil. 

And then, into this primeval family the children came: 
first Cain, over whom, in happy ignorance of the future, 
his mother rejoiced and said : " I have gotten a man from 
the Lord " ; then Abel, and no doubt many other sons and 
daughters of whom no personal mention is made. Cain 
and Abel only are spoken of as yet, because upon them 
the interest, the dark and painful interest, of the sacred 
story becomes fixed. The two brothers were born and 



THE FIRST FAMILY. 59 

grew to manhood. Constrained to fulfil the new law of 
human existence, and eat their bread in the sweat of 
their face, Cain became a tiller of the ground, and Abel 
a keeper of sheep. 

The sacred narrative now goes on with a statement 
very brief, but very suggestive and important. After a 
time, we are told, the two brothers brought an offering 
unto the Lord : Cain of the fruits of the ground, Abel 
of the firstlings of his flock and the fat thereof. Now 
why should these brothers have brought an offering un- 
to the Lord? and why was the whole transaction invested 
with such exceeding importance as it evidently bore in 
their eyes ? The answer to these questions is found in 
the whole tenor of the sacred narrative. It is clearly im- 
plied that these brothers had been taught to worship by 
sacrifice and offering, and that they had been taught of 
God ; for from no other source could their instruction 
have come. This teaching of these few verses has an 
important bearing upon the history of that long, dark, 
and to us almost unknown period which intervened be- 
tween the creation of our first parents and the Flood. 
It is clearly implied, not in these verses alone, but in all 
the earlier portions of the scriptural record, that, in their 
childish simplicity and helplessness, the men of these 
earliest generations of our race enjoyed a special and pe- 
culiar privilege ; that God, in his fatherly goodness, con- 
descended to communicate freely and familiarly with 
heads of families and with individual men, to guide them 
in their ignorance, and to teach them the truth which 
they most needed to know. 

It seems at the first glance as if, for all the thousands 
of years between the first transgression and the Flood, 
God had almost forsaken the world ; as if through all 
this period men had been left to their own dark way, to 



60 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

learn slowly and painfully by experience alone. But this 
we may be sure was not the case. According to the nar- 
rative before us, it certainly was not so with Cain and 
Abel. It would have been contrary to the whole course 
of God's dealings with men. The best way to under- 
stand God's method with His children is to consider how 
we treat and feel toward our own. Our way with our 
children is not to turn them out to wander up and down 
the world neglected and uncared for, until we think they 
have grown to be worth something. Under this treat- 
ment they would never grow to be worth any thing. It 
is precisely in their tenderest, most helpless years that 
we most lavish upon them our kindness and care. We 
may be sure that the gracious Father of all dealt in just 
the same way with our race. As these earliest chapters 
of the Bible teach us, in the childish weakness and igno- 
rance of the first generations of men, it was his good 
pleasure to communicate with each individual man who 
was willing to look to him for guidance and help, more 
freely and familiarly than he has ever done in later 
times. In the process of the centuries, as population be- 
gan to grow dense and crowded in the more fruitful and 
favored regions, with little of social and political order, 
with nothing like well-settled government to control it, 
it was a sad necessity that anarchy, violence, and wicked- 
ness should begin to fill the earth. But it is pleasant 
to think that through all the long, quiet, twilight ages 
before this evil time, as the result of this divine instruc- 
tion, there was many an Abel, many an Enoch, and many 
families of such men, who lived in the fear of the Lord, 
and whose simple piety and lowly virtues adorned and 
blessed the earth. 

And now, returning to the offerings of the two brothers, 
we must inquire why that of Abel was accepted, while 



THE FIRST FAMILY. 6 1 

that of Cain was not. Abel's offering was the firstlings 
of his flock, while Cain's was of the fruits of the earth. 
Each of the brothers brought his offering of the fruit of 
his own labor ; and it seems, at first thought, very strange 
that they should not have been equally acceptable in the 
sight of God. In considering this point we may observe 
that in the later sacrificial system of the Old Testament, 
there is a broad distinction between sin-offerings and 
thank-offerings. Offerings of corn, bread, wine, and oil 
were thank-offerings ; while a sin-offering, intended as an ex- 
pression of conscious guilt, of confession of sin, and prayer 
for pardon, unless the worshipper were too poor to bring 
such an offering, was always an animal offered by fire 
with the fat and the blood. Now, in the narrative be- 
fore us, it seems to be implied that Cain and Abel had 
been taught this distinction, and how they must sacri- 
fice if they would worship acceptably. If this was so, the 
case is very clear. Abel's offering was the worship of a 
humble, penitent, reverent soul, feeling its guilt, and pray- 
ing to be accepted and forgiven ; Cain would stoop to no 
such humble confession and prayer, would do no more 
than coldly acknowledge the goodness of God. But 
whether this were so or not, the. spirit in which the two 
men brought their offerings is amply sufficient to explain 
the whole. " By faith Abel offered unto God a more ex- 
cellent sacrifice than Cain, by which he obtained witness 
that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts." Cain's 
offering was that of a dark, malignant spirit, from which 
true worship could never come. 

It may, perhaps, seem strange that a man of such a 
spirit should care so much for the divine blessing. But 
it was not strange. Here were some half dozen men and 
women alone in the wide earth ; and alone in the com- 
plete helplessness of their childish condition. Under 



62 



FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 



these circumstances it could not be but that a profound 
sense of loneliness, weakness, and dependence upon God 
should possess every mind, even that of Cain. And when 
Abel was accepted and he was not, Cain felt, as Esau felt 
in later times, that his brother had supplanted him in 
the divine favor, and obtained the blessing that should 
have been his. This feeling grew and strengthened in 
his gloomy soul until it had become a madness of envy 
and jealous rage ; until he had raised against his brother 
a bloody hand, and stained his soul with a murderer's 
guilt. Thus, in a brother's blood, began the fulfilment 
of the doom : " Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou 
return." The punishment of the fearful deed followed 
swift upon its commission. " The voice of thy brother's 
blood," said the righteous Judge of all, " crieth unto me 
from the ground." But this punishment was comparatively 
light and gentle. The crime was, morally, that of a little 
child, committed against but little light, and with but 
little understanding of the true character of the deed. 
The doom pronounced upon the murderer was not, as in 
after-times, that his life should pay the penalty of his 
crime, but that he should bear with him to his grave the 
awful brand of his guilt, and should be a fugitive and a 
vagabond in the earth. 

So began the long and dreadful history of human vio- 
lence, and crime, and bloody guilt. Even to us, in this 
far-distant age, it seems a dark and fearful scene, casting 
a gloomy shade over all the subsequent destinies of the 
race. What then must it have been to that one unhappy 
family, alone in the earth, in the bosom of which it oc- 
curred ; to the mother who had nursed these first-born 
children of the earth, to the father who had looked upon 
them as the hope of his family and of the world ? And 
how must this dark and awful event have burned into the 



THE FIRST FAMILY. 63 

minds of all the earlier generations of men a horror of 
blood-guiltiness, and of those fierce, malignant passions 
which lead to such fearful acts. 

It was fitting that the Bible should begin with the first 
opening of the moral history of mankind ; and the more 
we study these first chapters of Genesis, the more we shall 
be impressed with the wonderful fulness and clearness 
with which God revealed himself, at this first starting- 
point of the world's great history, to the first individuals 
of our race. There is a whole Bible of revealed truth in 
these first four chapters of Genesis; enough, it would 
seem, if no more had been given, to enlighten the spirit- 
ual darkness of the world. Here is revealed the one 
eternal and omnipotent God, creating all things by the 
word of his power, creating man in his own image, and 
breathing into his mortal body his own immortal life. 
Here God has revealed himself the King and Judge of 
all the earth, whose holy will all must obey, who cannot 
look upon iniquity, and before whom the wicked shall 
not go unpunished. He has revealed himself as the 
God of providence and grace, upon whom all men de- 
pend, and before whom, in humble, reverent, grateful 
worship, all men ought to bow. Finally, he has revealed 
himself as the gentle, compassionate Father of all the 
children of men, to whom it is the privilege of every 
penitent and trusting soul to come in every time of need 
with full assurance of faith. 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE CHILDHOOD OF THE RACE. 

We have considered the creation of man and the in- 
fancy of our race. We have seen our first parents, after 
their first transgression, driven forth from the garden of 
Eden to begin the long and painful, but most profit- 
able and fruitful process of human toil and trial, experi- 
ence and development. Let us now pass on to consider 
the next stage of this eventful history — the Childhood of 
the Race; a stage neither narrow in its extent, nor brief 
in its duration. For in connection with this topic we 
shall have occasion to consider the moral position in the 
sight of God, and under his government, of all those 
countless millions of our fellow-men, in all ages of the 
world, who, being as yet too unintelligent, too low in the 
moral and intellectual scale to receive and understand a 
full revelation of divine truth, have been left, through 
no fault of their own, in the darkness and superstition of 
heathenism. For we must remember that the vast ma- 
jority of the human family have never yet passed beyond 
the condition of childhood. 

All that is known, all that need be said of the long period 
extending from the first transgression to the refounding 
of human society in the family of Noah, may be comprised 
in few words. Our first parents and their children went 
forth from the garden in the full vigor of a merely physi- 
cal humanity, but as untaught and ignorant, as narrow in 
the range of their thoughts and ideas, with just as little 

64 



THE CHILDHOOD OF THE RACE. 65 

understanding of their duties and relations as moral and 
social beings, as if they had been but little children of 
four or five years old. The slow awakening of their 
mental powers, and the pressure of their daily wants led 
them, in the course of ages, to the discovery and practice 
of some of the simpler mechanic arts ; but through all 
the thousands of years before the Deluge, the primeval 
race seems to have vegetated on, without letters or in- 
tellectual culture, without law, or government, or social 
order, without laying the first foundation-stone of civil 
society. So entirely incapable were they through all 
this period of either intellectual activity or moral culture, 
that God seems to have made to them as a race no revela- 
tion of his truth. Excepting his personal communica- 
tions with here and there a single individual or head of a 
family, he seems to have left them to the slow teachings 
of experience alone. But experience, however slow and 
painful its instruction may be, is a faithful teacher, and 
never fails in the end to impress lessons of wisdom upon 
the minds of men. And so, after many thousands of 
years, how many no man in this world will ever know, 
in the person of Noah a man was at length developed 
capable of higher and better things ; and while this man 
was severed out to become the father of a new and nobler 
race, the waters of the flood were poured upon the earth 
to clear an adequate field in which that race might settle 
and multiply. 

The time had now come when the hitherto scattered 
and disjointed elements of society could be united in 
some rude form of social order; when the human mind 
had been so strengthened and instructed that it was able to 
receive some general idea of the providential government 
of God, some partial revelation of his truth. It is most 
instructive to observe how partial and meagre was the 



66 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

revelation made even to Noah, as being all that men 
were as yet prepared and able to receive. They were 
taught the unity of God, his sovereignty, his justice and 
holiness, and his covenant-keeping mercy; to this revela- 
tion of divine truth was added the single law that the 
shedder of human blood should himself be put to death, 
and this was all. So far as we are informed, this new 
and better relation taught men little in regard to their 
personal relations and duties, gave them no systematic 
revelation of divine truth, established no church, no in- 
stitutions of worship, or of religious instruction. The 
social and political part of the divine plan had yet to be 
carried forward a vast stage in its unfolding ; the minds 
of men had yet to be greatly enlarged, their knowledge 
to be greatly increased, before any thing in the nature of 
religious institutions could be founded, before the Church 
could be planted as a living organization, a permanent 
blessing to mankind. 

The truth thus rises before us that the earlier genera- 
tions of our race, and the heathen nations of the world in 
every age, have lived in their sad condition of moral 
darkness, not because they had wickedly rejected the full 
light of divine truth, but because their knowledge and 
their moral and intellectual capacity were so small, their 
minds so feeble and untrained, and all the circumstances of 
their lot in life so unfavorable, that it was impossible for 
them to receive that light. But what shall we say of the 
moral condition in this life, and the destiny in the life to 
come, of all these unenlightened millions, as yet the vast 
majority of the human family, who have been, not alone 
so intellectually weak and ignorant, but so morally vile, 
that they can never enter that pure and holy heaven 
which is the inheritance of the sons of God? This great 
process of human training and development, which, under 



THE CHILDHOOD OF THE RACE. 67 

the providence and grace of God, has been going on for 
all these thousands of years, is a happy and blessed thing 
for us, who are permitted to gather its mature and 
glorious fruits. But far otherwise was it with those 
early generations of our race, who were left to die in 
their darkness, their ignorance, and their sin, that the far- 
distant generations of their children might reap in the 
fruits of their experience blessings which were impossible 
to them. 

This great question, how we are to vindicate the justice 
and goodness of God in his dealings with the heathen 
world, is one which must lie heavily upon every thought- 
ful Christian mind. But, happily, it is a question to 
which the clear and positive teachings of the Bible will 
lead us to a satisfying answer. " Where no law is, there 
is no transgression." " The times of this ignorance God 
winked at." These declarations are based in the princi- 
ple so emphatically affirmed by Christ himself, that the 
responsibility of men is always measured by the light 
they enjoy, and that to whom little is given, of him little 
shall be required. In the light of these teachings we may 
find a solution of the great problem of the moral condi- 
tion and destiny of those who have never heard the 
sound of the gospel ; a solution which will perfectly har- 
monize with the Bible, and fully vindicate both the jus- 
tice and the goodness of God. 

I. Let us then settle it with ourselves, in the first place, 
that nothing can be more certain than that those who 
have never heard either the law of God, or the gospel of 
his Son, can never enter that heaven which shall be the 
inheritance of his saints. This truth is taught distinctly 
and emphatically by the Scriptures ; it is taught as dis- 
tinctly and certainly by reason itself. Fitness for heaven 
is the highest issue and result of that great moral educa- 



68 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

tion to which, under the providence of God, men are sub- 
jected in this world of probation. It depends wholly 
upon a character of purity and holiness formed by obedi- 
ence and love to God, and faith in his Son Jesus Christ. 
The unchristian man, therefore, the man wholly untaught 
in divine truth, untrained to obey, trust, and love, can 
never be fit for heaven. Heaven is the home of God's 
obedient, loving children, and of them alone. The wild 
Indian of our western forests would fly as fast and as far 
from the Christian's heaven, as from the Christian's home. 
He cannot endure the restraints, he cannot enjoy the 
pleasures, or pursue the employments of civilized and re- 
fined society; much lesss could he endure the higher re- 
finements, enjoy the more exalted pleasures, engage in 
the nobler employments of heaven. The only heaven 
which would be heaven to him is that pictured by his 
own simple imagination : — 

" Some softer world, in depth of wood embraced, 
Some happier island in the watery waste, 
Where slaves once more their native land behold, 
No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold. 
To be content 's his natural desire, 
He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire ; 
But thinks, admitted to that equal sky, 
His faithful dog shall bear him company." 

And so the Brahmin and the Moslem, having no fitness 
for refined and elevated Christian society here, will have 
far less fitness for the same society when exalted and per- 
fected in heaven. It is thus clearly true that un- 
christian men of whatever name, or from whatever land, 
cannot enter heaven ; and more than this, that they 
would not if they could. It would be no heaven to them. 
They have no fitness for it, could find no comfort or 
happiness in it. They will fly from it as the Indian flies 
from the cities and the dwellings of civilized life. 



THE CHILDHOOD OF THE RACE. 69 

We may believe that God has been busy from the be- 
ginning, patiently, unweariedly, and with all his might, 
in preparing the largest possible number of the human 
family for his heavenly home ; and that every human be- 
ing in whom it was possible for him, in accordance with 
the laws of his moral government, and of the man's own 
being, to work this high and ennobling education, this 
wonderful and blessed transformation, he will bring with 
him to that final dwelling-place of the saints. But we 
must believe with equal confidence that all upon whom 
this change has not passed, must be excluded from a 
heaven for which they have no fitness, which would be no 
heaven to them. 

II. Let us now pass to the second point of our subject, 
a point which claims our most thoughtful attention. 

It follows with equal certainty from the principles affirm- 
ed in these passages that mere exclusion from heaven is 
not equivalent to the dooming of the soul to everlasting 
punishment ; and, more than this, that even perpetual 
exclusion from heaven does not necessarily imply unhap- 
piness in the future state. 

The law which governs the destiny of every moral and 
accountable being is that the life to come shall be the 
proper result or sequence of the present life. The hap- 
piness or misery, the joy or woe, of the life beyond the 
grave, is to be the harvest of the sowing here. " Whatso- 
ever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." But suppose 
there were a heathen man who all his life long had vio- 
lated no law of truth or right which had been revealed to 
his knowledge ; who had always lived and acted in per- 
fect accordance with his convictions of duty. What 
should we say of such a man ? Probably no such man 
has ever lived ; but if there were such a man, it is very 
plain what our judgment in regard to him must be. 



JO FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

There would be no wrath of God resting upon him ; he 
would suffer no pangs of an accusing conscience ; he 
would be subject to no punishment for the violation of 
any law. Yet he could never enter heaven. That great 
moral and spiritual transformation which alone can fit a 
man for heaven has never passed upon him. His spirit- 
ual nature is low and untrained for holiness. He has 
never learned to love God, to trust in him as a Father, to 
obey in all things his pure and holy law ; and while subject 
to no punishment for conscious guilt, he can never enter 
a holy heaven. If there were such a man, it is clear that 
he must still retain very much the same relative position 
in the future state which he had held in the life of mor- 
tality. He can find no place among them that are justi- 
fied through faith in Christ, and sanctified by the power 
of the Holy Spirit. He has never been thus justified 
and sanctified, can have no fitness, and no desire, for a 
Christian's heaven. But on the other hand, he will suf- 
fer no pangs of remorse, no terrors of the wrath of God. 
He has been, in his low way, an honest, sincere, and virt- 
uous heathen here, has thus acquired a measure of true 
excellence and happiness ; and much the same he must 
remain in the world to come. 

This is the ideal, imaginary case of a heathen man who 
should live fully up to the light which, as the Apostle 
tells us in the first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, 
even the heathen enjoy. The future world will not be 
limited to two narrow abodes, a heaven of glory and a 
hell of everlasting woe. We must remember that the 
realm of our God and Judge is very vast ; and that he 
can be at no loss for means and facilities to fulfil his 
divine word, and give to every man according as his 
works shall be, no matter how widely various the charac- 
ter of those works may have been. The conscientious 



THE CHILDHOOD OF THE RACE. 7 1 

and virtuous heathen, like Socrates or Plato, will find a 
fitting and appropriate place in the world to come, no 
less than the faithful Christian, or the greatest sinner un- 
der gospel light. 

These passages thus teach us that while the unsancti- 
fied soul can find no place in a holy heaven, all suffering 
and unhappiness in the life to come will be the result of 
known sin and conscious guilt ; of offences that were 
without excuse, because in violation of a law known and 
understood. They teach us that the upright and virt- 
uous heathen is under no doom of eternal misery for a 
state of moral darkness which was a sad necessity in his 
case, and to which he was born by God's own appoint- 
ment. They teach us that except for the results of 
known sin and conscious guilt, every man, whether Chris- 
tian or heathen, whether civilized or savage, shall find 
himself in the world to come, whether in heaven or out 
of heaven, in the best and highest place for which he is 
prepared, a place with which he shall be perfectly satis- 
fied and content. To one and all alike, the only hell of 
that retributive state will be remorse of soul, and the 
righteous anger of a holy God, for sin knowingly com- 
mitted, for wickedness which had no excuse. And to 
this perdition of ungodly men the savage who lives in 
lust and blood, disregarding and violating those laws of 
right and duty which nature has taught him, is just as 
much exposed as the sinner in Christian lands. For this 
guilt the retributions of the eternal future will bring to 
him a measure of punishment just according to his light 
and his responsibility. 

III. Keeping these points in view, we are now pre- 
pared to go a step further. From the teachings of the 
Scriptures, and the goodness and kindness which are es- 
sential characteristics of the divine nature, we may confi- 



7 2 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

dently infer that God is just as busy by his providence 
and grace in heathen lands as he is in Christian lands, 
for the guidance and help of every sincere and honest 
soul. 

We are thus taught that God regards the heathen 
world in fatherly kindness and compassion, not in re- 
pugnance and wrath. They are not responsible for their 
darkness and ignorance. They do not occupy their pres- 
ent position of heathenism and moral midnight by any 
act, or any neglect of theirs. The barbarous, unenlight- 
ened forms of society are just as much a part of the 
divine plan in this world's history as the civilized and the 
Christian. And over these less favored children of his 
creative power and providential government, his fatherly 
kindness and grace are just as much extended as over 
those who so proudly hold, and so shamefully abuse, his 
richer gifts. The Lord seeth not as man seeth, and 
his judgment upon untaught heathen men is very differ- 
ent from ours. Forgetting that where no law is, there is 
no transgression, we often, in our self-righteousness, and 
proud consciousness of superiority, are inclined to look 
down upon these, our less favored brethren of the great 
family of man, with contempt for their social rudeness, 
their ignorance, and their barbarian vices, and to regard 
them scornfully as the most wicked, the vilest of men. 

But not such is the judgment respecting them of the 
just and merciful God. Where we write a sentence of 
such bitter condemnation, he sees comparatively little to 
abhor. They know not his law, have never heard the 
tidings of his great salvation ; and holding them respon- 
sible only for those sins which, even in their case, are 
without excuse, the times of their ignorance he still 
winks at. The wickedness of men in his sight is pro- 
portioned to the light they enjoy ; and in this one land 



THE CHILDHOOD OF THE RACE. 73 

of Christian light and privilege he sees far more to move 
his abhorrence and provoke his wrath, than in all the 
heathen nations of the world together. 

It is not in hatred and wrath, but in compassion and 
tender love, that God looks down upon the sad condition 
of the heathen world ; and wheresoever he perceives an 
honest and conscientious purpose to learn and obey the 
truth, there ever is his kindly hand employed, his gra- 
cious aid bestowed. In the introduction to Longfellow's 
Hiawatha there is a passage, as true as it is beautiful,, 
which expresses what ought to be the feeling of every 
man who has faith in God and love for his fellow-men. 

" Yc whose hearts are fresh and simple, 
Who have faith in God and nature, 
Who believe that in all ages 
Every human heart is human ; 
That in even savage bosoms 
There are longings, yearnings, strivings 
For the good they comprehend not ; 
That the feeble hands and helpless, 
Groping blindly in the darkness, 
Touch God's right hand in that darkness 
And are lifted up and strengthened, 
Listen to this simple story, 
To this Sone: of Hiawatha." 



, . •. 



To these sentiments we may joyfully subscribe. We 
may believe that many a virtuous and God-fearing 
heathen, like Cornelius the Roman centurion, like Soc- 
rates, and Cicero, and that noblest ornament of the 
heathen world, the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, 
and like many another whose humble name has never 
fallen upon Christian ears, has been filled with longings, 
yearnings, strivings for the good which they could not 
comprehend ; and that groping blindly in the darkness, 
they have touched God's right hand in that darkness* 



74 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

and been lifted up and strengthened. We may stand 
as Abraham stood, in the firm assurance that the Judge 
of all the earth will do right. He will never leave one 
honest and truth-loving soul, longing for the light and 
earnestly seeking after it, without the blessing of his gra- 
cious aid, his providential guidance, and his fatherly love. 
As has been already observed, we may believe that if 
there were a heathen man, who should live all his life in 
perfect obedience to that small measure of the law of 
truth and duty revealed to him by the light of nature, 
thus forming his character to truth and virtue, and dying 
at last oppressed by the guilt of no actual transgression, 
while he would have no fitness and no desire for the 
Christian's heaven, he would yet pass on to an immortality 
of such dignity and enjoyment as would be the proper 
result of his virtuous life. And although it may be true 
that no heathen has ever lived thus wholly free from 
guilt, we may believe that God has by his providence 
and grace led many a truth-loving and virtuous heathen 
far onward toward this ideal state. Socrates, and 
Marcus Aurelius, and the great multitude of such men, 
who in the long ages of the world's past history, 
have adorned even heathen society, we may not expect 
to find at last in the heaven of perfected and glorified 
saints. We cannot expect to find them even in that in- 
ferior state of happiness, which, if there had ever existed 
any to deserve it, we might call the heathen's heaven. 
But we may expect to find them, by their honesty and 
virtue, their love for and obedience to the truth, so far 
as they could discover it, lifted far upward toward such a 
state. And so we may be sure that God is everywhere 
busy, even in heathen lands, leading by the hand every 
man who loves the truth and is willing to obey it, and 
doing all that can be done for him, to develop and 



THE CHILDHOOD OF THE RACE. 75 

strengthen his moral nature, and elevate him in the scale 
of being. 

The purposes of the divine mercy, and the gracious 
workings of the divine providence have not been limited 
to those portions of the world which have received the 
full light of revealed truth. They have always, from the 
beginning, embraced the whole family of man. When i 
the plan of redemption was inaugurated by the promise 
to our first parents that the seed of the woman should 
bruise the serpent's head, it was the purpose of God to 
extend the blessings of that redemption to every tribe 
and family of the sinful race. As the great process was 
carried slowly onward, it was necessary that the light of 
divine truth should shine upon some families sooner and 
more clearly than upon others ; that some should be 
selected for a special training, that they in turn might 
become the teachers of their fellow-men. But this elec- 
tion of grace did not mean mercy and favor for the 
chosen few, and only hatred and wrath for the vast 
majority of the race still left in darkness. It was kind- 
ness and love for all alike ; the purpose to bestow upon 
all alike, at the earliest possible time, the fulness of the 
blessings of the gospel of peace. The day of redemption 
for the heathen nations has been long delayed, and even 
now it is but just dawning upon them. But through all 
these ages of darkness, the mercy of God toward them 
has not slept, or been turned away from them. He has 
still watched over them for good, punishing their wicked- 
ness, smiling graciously upon their rude barbarian virt- 
ues, looking with fatherly leniency upon those faults 
and errors which were the sad but necessary result of 
their unenlightened state, and so directing the course of 
events by his providence, that in the fulness of time the 
way might be prepared for the preaching among them of 
the gospel of his Son. 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE FLOOD : THE GLACIAL AGE : AND THE ANTEDI- 
LUVIAN WORLD. 

THE general Deluge, so briefly yet graphically de- 
scribed in the 7th and 8th chapters of the Book of Gene- 
sis, has universally and justly impressed itself upon the 
minds of men as the greatest catastrophe of human his- 
tory. The memory of that awful event has been pre- 
served in the traditions of almost every people. The 
Chaldaeans, the Greeks, the Hindus, and the Chinese, 
the rude Celts who dwelt in Gaul and Britain before the 
Christian era, and the ruder Scythians of Northern Asia, 
the simple natives of the South Pacific Islands, and the 
Mexicans and Peruvians of America ; all these tribes and 
races had, in one form or another, the same story of 
a fearful deluge which, in the earliest times, overspread 
the earth and destroyed the great majority of the human 
family. The narration in Genesis, thus confirmed, must 
be pronounced the simple statement of actual and well- 
known facts. Principal Dawson calls this scriptural ac- 
count of the Flood the log-book of Noah ; and it certainly 
bears every mark of being the story, not simply of an 
eye-witness of the Flood, but of a man intimately con- 
nected with the building and management of the Ark. 

The date of the Flood is fixed by Archbishop Usher, 
and the received chronology, at 2349 B. c. In this as- 
sumed date of the Flood lies the chief difficulty con- 
nected with the subject. This vast deluge, at the lowest 

76 



THE FLOOD, ETC. 77 

calculation, must have covered the whole region of 
Southwestern Asia and Southern Europe. But not only- 
do these regions show no trace of any such physical 
catastrophe within the past three thousand years, it 
seems entirely impossible that, within this period, any 
such catastrophy can have occurred. This difficulty, 
long the hopeless puzzle of Christian men of science, 
seems now to have been effectually dispelled. It is be- 
coming very clear that the date assigned to the Flood in 
our received chronology rests upon no sufficient ground, 
— in fact, upon no ground at all. Usher's chronology is 
based upon the genealogical tables of the fifth, tenth, and 
eleventh chapters of Genesis. But these genealogies, as 
the best and most judicious biblical scholars are now 
agreed, afford no data whatever for a true chronology. 
In the first place, it is very doubtful whether the num- 
bers of these genealogies, as they now stand in our Eng- 
lish Bibles, formed any part of the original documents 
or traditions which were incorporated in the Book of 
Genesis. The Pentateuch has come down to us in three 
different forms. We have the received Hebrew text, of 
which our English Pentateuch is a translation ; the 
Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Old Testa- 
ment, which was* the form of the Old Testament 
Scriptures in use among the early Christians ; and the 
Samaritan Pentateuch, which seems to be the oldest of 
the three. But in the numbers of these genealogical tables 
no one of the three versions agrees with either of the 
others. The Samaritan Pentateuch makes the period of 
time from the creation of Adam to the Deluge, 349 
years shorter than the Hebrew text, while the Septua- 
gint makes it 606 years longer than the Hebrew. Nor is 
there any reason for selecting any one of the three ver- 
sions as being correct upon this point in preference to 



78 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

the other two. The inference seems unavoidable that 
the numbers of these tables were arranged by the He- 
brew genealogists of later times to suit their own ideas. 
But this is not all. The Hebrew genealogies were con- 
structed with but one end in view, which was to trace 
the descent of some family or individual from some great 
ancestor. They make no pretence of inserting every 
link in the long chain of descent, or of covering the whole 
period of intervening time. In the genealogy of our 
Lord, in the first chapter of Matthew, Uzziah is given as 
the son of Jehoram. A period of 70 years, and the three 
kings, Ahaziah, Joash, and Amaziah are thus entirely 
dropped out of the account. A similar hiatus occurs in 
Ezra's account of his own descent (Ez. vii, 1-5). He 
drops four of his ancestors from the line, whose 
names are given in 1 Chr. v, 14-15. So also Jehu is 
called the son of his grandfather Nimshi, and La- 
ban the son of his grandfather Nahor. With these 
facts before us, we must conclude, with Poole and Philip 
Smith, that the Hebrew genealogies cannot be used as 
data for computing periods of time before the Call of 
Abraham. Accepting this point as established, we may 
go farther, and conclude with confidence that the Bible 
contains no chronology for the times anterior to Abra- 
ham ; that the dates of the Deluge and the creation of 
man are left just as uncertain as the date of the creation 
of the world. 

These conclusions have been reached by Christian schol- 
ars simply in the light of sacred history, and a sound 
biblical exegesis ; and with no reference to what geology 
may have to teach in regard to the earliest generations 
of men. In respect to the Flood, therefore, as in respect 
to the Creation, we find the ground entirely clear before 
us in our endeavor to point out the perfect harmony of 



THE FLOOD, ETC, 79 

revealed and scientific truth. In his other book, God 
has given us a record of the earliest human age far more 
varied and complete than that written under the guidance 
of his Spirit upon the pages of the Bible. This record, 
written in the substance of the earth itself, we have as 
yet but just begun to read and understand. We have read 
enough of it, however, to see clearly that the two records 
are in perfect agreement ; to see also, and with equal 
clearness, that the dates respectively of the creation of 
man and of the Deluge must be carried back to points of 
time very far anterior to those assigned them in our 
received chronology. 

The cause of the Flood is made sufficiently clear in 
the scriptural record. The fountains of the great deep 
were broken up and the windows of heaven were opened. 
The breaking up of the fountains of the great deep is put 
first, as being the chief and efficient cause. It was, in 
fact, the only cause. The deluges of rain poured upon 
the earth for forty days, had no effect whatever in pro- 
ducing this all-engulfing flood. Since the atmosphere 
became relieved of its excessive burden of vapors and 
assumed its present constitution, the quantity of water 
upon the earth has remained unchangeably the same. 
None falls upon its surface in the form of rain which 
has not first been raised from its surface by evapo- 
ration. It is just like pumping water out of a vessel 
and back into the same vessel again. No conceivable 
deluges of rain could change the level of the sea by the 
hundredth part of an inch. The Flood was caused by 
the breaking up of the fountains of the great deep ; that 
is to say, by the sudden sinking of the land beneath the 
level of the sea, so that the waters of the ocean came 
pouring in upon the land, engulfing all things beneath 
their waves. The land of all that part of the surface of 



80 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

the globe suddenly settled below the level of the sea. 
It settled, slowly to rise again, but not to its former 
height. 

This subsidence and re-elevation of the land was noth- 
ing new in the earth's history. There had been many 
such sinkings and risings before. In the Cretaceous age, 
toward the close of the fifth creative day, J the broad 
continents of the Jurassic age, which seem to have been 
more extensive than our present continents, were all sub- 
merged ; and one vast ocean spread its waves over almost 
the whole surface of what is now the land of the northern 
hemisphere. At the beginning of the sixth day, that is, 
at the opening of the Eocene age, of the Tertiary or 
Neozoic period, the continents had begun to reappear. 
Their re-elevation, however, was very slow ; and after the 
middle of the Eocene age, the whole of the wide region, 
stretching from the coast of France on the west to the 
Sea of China on the east, where now tower the Pyrenees, 
the Alps, the Carpathians, and the Himalayas, lay deeply 
buried beneath the waters of the ocean. By the middle 
of the sixth day, and of the Tertiary period, the land had 
risen to its fullest height, its largest breadth. 

This Miocene age was the culmination of unintelligent 
nature, of the old pre-Adamite earth. Never before, and 
never since, has the state of things in the northern hemi- 
sphere been so favorable to a rapid and enormous de- 
velopment of animal and vegetable life. A climate, 
warmer than that of New England at the present time, 
extended northward almost to the pole. Pines, oaks, 
beeches, limes, magnolias, vines, and evergreen oaks 
flourished luxuriantly in Northern Greenland, and on the 
island of Spitzbergen ; while a vast variety of mammalian 
animals, many of them of gigantic size, as much larger 

1 See the chart on page 17. 



THE FLOOD, ETC. 8 1 

than our modern elephants as the elephant is larger than 
the ox, scattered their bones everywhere to be the won- 
der of a far-distant age. 

In the next age, the Pliocene, all was changed. A 
deathly chill was falling upon the earth, and the tribes of 
living things, both animal and vegetable, were dwindling 
and passing away. Slowly but surely the reign of ice 
and winter gained upon the earth, until at last, in the 
post-Pliocene or Glacial age, wide-spreading masses of ice 
thousands of feet in thickness, like that which now covers 
the elevated plains of Northern Greenland, advanced 
southward along the lines of the great mountain ranges, 
and covered all the regions of the greatest deposition 
of snow and rain, until they reached points in some 
mountainous districts within the limits of the torrid zone. 
At the culmination of the Glacial period, true moving 
glaciers covered something like one third of all the land 
of the northern hemisphere above the fortieth parallel 
north latitude. In North America, one vast glacier, at 
some points more than 5,000 feet in thickness, stretched 
westward from the Atlantic to a line west of the Missis- 
sippi, and northward to the polar regions. Across the 
arid interior of the continent, the accumulation of ice 
was not sufficient, in most localities, to produce moving 
glaciers, and few marks of glacial action appear. A 
second line of glaciers followed down the range of the 
Rocky Mountains, and a third covered the Pacific slope. 
President Hitchcock found evidence that, at the height 
of the glacial cold, the ice filled our own valley, rising 
high above the summits of Mount Holyoke and Mount 
Tom. Other geologists tell us that these enormous 
glaciers covered the whole of New England, crossed 
Long Island Sound, and ended in an immense ice-cliff on 
the southern coast of Long Island. 



82 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

Of this astonishing change in temperature between the 
Miocene and the post-Pliocene, long the hopeless puzzle 
of scientific men, the causes seem now to have been 
clearly ascertained. Two causes, now well understood, 
seem sufficient to explain the whole. The first cause no 
doubt arose from changes in the temperature, volume, 
and direction of the great oceanic currents. These vast 
oceanic rivers of heated water, always flowing from the 
equator toward the pole, would be enough, under certain 
conditions, to carry a warm climate, for more than half 
the year, to the latitude of Northern Greenland and 
Spitzbergen, as they now do to the western coast of 
British America. 

The second and most effective cause is found in vari- 
ations in the eccentricity of the earth's orbit. The orbit 
of the earth is not a circle, but an ellipse ; that is, a flat- 
tened circle, like the section of a symmetrical egg-shell, 
cut through upon the line of its longest diameter. The 
position of the sun, further, is not at the centre of the 
ellipse, but at one of its two foci, much nearer to one end 
of its longer diameter than to the other. The point of 
the earth's orbit where it is nearest the sun is called its 
perihelion, that at which it is furthest from the sun its 
aphelion. When in perihelion, at present, we are 3,000,- 
000 of miles nearer the sun than when in aphelion. The 
time of the earth's perihelion and aphelion is slowly but 
constantly changing, making the complete circuit of the 
year in 21,356 years. Now, the earth is at perihelion 
January 1st, at aphelion July 1st. But 10,678 years ago, 
just the opposite was true. Then it was at aphelion Jan- 
uary 1st, at perihelion July 1st We shall need to obtain 
a clear idea of these changes in the orbit of the earth, 
and in its position at different times in the year with re- 



THE FLOOD, ETC. 



83 



spect to the sun, if we would understand the causes 
which produced the Flood. 1 




On the first day of January we are now at perihelion, 
and 3,000,000 of miles nearer the sun than we are on 
the first day of July. It thus appears that our changes 
of season are not owing at all to changes in the distance 
of the earth from the sun. They are produced by 
changes in the sun's altitude above the southern horizon 
at noon, at different times in the year. We all of us 

1 This figure may represent the elliptical orbit of the earth, A P its longer 
diameter, C D its shorter diameter, f F its two foci, and F the place of the 
sun. P will represent the place of the earth at perihelion, A its place at 
aphelion. The earth's orbit, however, is by no means as eccentric as the 
ellipse here represented. In a figure of this size the eye could not distin- 
guish it from a perfect circle. 



84 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

know by experience that the heat which we receive from 
the sun is directly proportioned to its elevation above the 
horizon. Its heat is most intense when, at noon of a 
midsummer day, its rays fall almost perpendicularly upon 
us. As the sun declines in the afternoon, its heat grows 
less and less, until, before sunset, it has almost ceased to 
be felt. Now the plane of the earth's orbit is inclined to 
the plane of its equator at an angle of twenty-three and 
one half degrees. For this reason, at midwinter the sun 
seems to revolve about the earth twenty-three degrees 
below the equator, while at midsummer it seems to rise 
the same distance above the equator. It is this low de- 
clension of the sun in the southern heavens that reduces 
the temperature of our climate to and below the freezing 
point, and causes our winter. At the same time, the in- 
creasing distance of the earth from the sun, from peri- 
helion to aphelion, has very important results, inasmuch 
as the power of the sun's heat increases or diminishes in 
the inverse ratio of the square of its distance. The fact 
that we are at perihelion in January gives us, compara- 
tively, a short and mild winter, followed by a long and 
cool summer. In the southern hemisphere, all this is ex- 
actly reversed. Our winter is their summer, and it is at 
midsummer that they are at perihelion. The result is 
that, beyond the middle of the southern hemisphere, a 
short and hot summer is followed by a long and terribly 
severe winter, and the region of perpetual ice and snow 
is brought down many degrees nearer the equator than in 
the northern hemisphere. The southern extremity of 
South America, with the latitude of Edinburgh and Co- 
penhagen, has the climate of Greenland. 

We come now to another and more important point. 
The eccentricity of the earth's orbit, that is, the differ- 
ence between its longer and shorter diameters, is not al- 



THE FLOOD, ETC. 8$ 

ways the same. In the past, it has varied very irregu- 
larly, but sometimes greatly. Mr. Croll and other 
eminent astronomers have calculated these variations 
backward from the present time for a period of three 
millions of years. The results at which they arrive are 
amply sufficient to account, not alone for the last Glacial 
period, but for other similar periods in earlier times. For 
the past sixty thousand years the earth's orbit has not 
varied enough to produce any important change in its 
climate. Beyond that point the eccentricity begins 
rapidly to increase. Seventy-two thousand years ago it 
was double its present amount ; one hundred thousand 
years ago it was two and a half times greater ; two hun- 
dred and ten thousand years ago it was three and a half 
times greater than it now is. Going back four hundred 
thousand years, which brings us, probably, to the Mio- 
cene age, we find the earth's orbit very nearly the same 
as at present. At the period of greatest eccentricity the 
earth was ten millions of miles farther from the sun at 
aphelion than at periphelion. It thus appears that, 
starting from a point of time seventy thousand years 
ago, for about 1 50,000 years the remoteness of the earth 
from the sun during half the year was quite sufficient to 
account for all the phenomena of the Glacial period. 
850,000 years ago there was a period of yet greater ec- 
centricity, when the earth was more than 13,000,000 of 
miles farther from the sun at aphelion than at perihelion. 
This must have produced a Glacial period of great 
intensity and long duration, which would seem to coin- 
cide with the great submergence of the continents, and 
the almost complete change in the character of animal 
life, at the close of the Mesozoic period, and of the fifth 
creative day. The Permian age, again, or the fourth 
creative day, appears to have been to some extent glacial 



86 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

in its character, and was marked by another submergence 
of the land, another great change in the character of ani- 
mal life. The Permian was the transition age between 
Palaeozoic and Mesozoic time. It would seem as if at each 
of these three transition points, the old world, with its 
now antiquated forms of life, had been frozen out, and its 
surface cleared for new and higher orders of living things. 1 
Toward the close of our last Glacial period there was 
another extensive submergence of the land, owing, appa- 
rently to the pressure of the enormous accumulations of 
ice in both the northern and southern regions of the 
globe, and over perhaps a third of its entire surface. 

The most remarkable, and, as it long seemed, the most 
unaccountable thing about the deposits of the Glacial 
period is now to be noticed. In many places, in both Eu- 
rope and North America, lying between the unstratified 
masses of gravel and boulders which everywhere reveal 
the long-continued action of ice, are found thick beds of 
stratified sand and gravel, with abundant remains of 
vegetable and animal life. Here is positive proof of 
the recurrence, with more or less frequency and regularity, 
of warm periods in the midst of the glacial cold. 2 We 
shall find that this strange fact, like all the other phe- 
nomena of the Glacial period, is perfectly explained by 
the astronomical causes which we have just considered. 

1 The same astronomical conditions which produced the later Glacial ages 
seem to have existed in the Permian, and some evidence of glacial action in 
that age is clearly apparent. The internal heat of the earth, however, was 
as yet sufficient to prevent any extended accumulation of ice except in moun- 
tainous regions. The general destruction of life in the Permian age was, ap- 
parently, due to chemical causes, particularly to the generation and pouring 
forth of immense quantities of poisonous gases, in the great and almost 
universal disturbances which then took place in the crust of the earth. 

2 Deep borings in different parts of Europe have shown the existence of at 
least four of these stratified layers, alternating with the unstratified drift. 
Each of these stratified layers represents a complete revolution of the Line 
of the Apsides (tne line connecting the points of perihelion and aphelion), 
and a period of 21,350 years. Here, therefore, we have proof that the Gla- 
cial period continued for more than 100,000 years. 



THE FLOOD, ETC. Sy 

Let us then enquire what would be the actual results 
of doubling, and at times trebling, the eccentricity of the 
earth's orbit, for a period of 150,000 years. At the 
time of the greatest eccentricity of its orbit, 210,000 
years ago, the earth was 10,000,000 of miles farther 
from the sun at aphelion than at perihelion. If the 
earth were then, as now, at its perihelion Jan. 1st, this 
immensely increased distance of the earth from the 
sun from May to September would deprive the northern 
hemisphere, beyond the immediate neighborhood of 
the equator, of all summer heat, and give it a climate 
of perpetual winter. The result of this state of things, 
continued for thousands of years, would be just that 
which actually took place. It would bring the climate 
and the glaciers of Greenland down to the very borders, 
at many places beyond the borders, of the torrid zone. 
But in the slow process of ages a great change would take 
place. After 10,678 years, the earth would be at its 
aphelion Jan. 1st, at its perihelion July 1st. But the 
greater the eccentricity of the earth's orbit, and the greater 
its distance from the sun at aphelion, the nearer does it 
come to the sun at perihelion. In these changed condi- 
tions, the northern hemisphere would have a long winter 
of more than arctic cold, followed by a short summer of 
almost furnace heat. And this state of things, in its 
turn, would continue for some thousands of years. For 
all this long period of time, the intense heat of summer 
would more than melt away the accumulations of snow 
and ice of the previous winter, through all the lower 
regions of the temperate zone ; so that, in the course of 
ages, the plains and lowlands as far north, perhaps, as 
the latitude of Edinburgh and Quebec, would become 
free from ice, and once more replenished with vege- 
table and animal life. Then the earth would slowly 



88 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

return to its January perihelion, and ice and winter 
would resume their ancient reign. It is to be observed, 
further, that through all the period of greatest eccen- 
tricity, while the earth was 10,000,000 of miles farther 
from the sun at aphelion than at perihelion, during some 
months of every year it would be wholly deprived, of 
summer heat ; so that through this part of every year, 
either November frosts, or winter cold, or arctic ice 
would prevail over all the surface of the globe. 

During all this time the state of things in the southern 
hemisphere was just the same as in the northern, only 
under conditions exactly reversed. For then, as always, 
winter in one hemisphere was summer in the other. 
Thus, in constant alternations with every 10,500 years, 
the thick accumulations of ice were approaching the 
equator on one side and receding on the other, through, 
perhaps, thirty degrees of latitude. Beyond this limit 
the reign of glacial cold must have remained perpetual 
and with little change. The enormous deposits of snow 
and ice went on continually increasing from age to age. 
As the result of the tremendous and long-continued pres- 
sure of this ever accumulating mass of ice, the crust of 
the earth at last gave way. The arctic and antarctic 
regions were both depressed, and this depression at the 
poles was followed by a corresponding elevation in 
the torrid and temperate zones. Through the closing 
ages of the Glacial period, the land of western-central 
Europe was in a state of unstable equilibrium, Britain 
and Germany were alternately elevated and depressed, 
sometimes through changes of level amounting to many 
hundred feet ; and the same thing appears to have been 
true here in New England. But with these exceptional 
and temporary changes, as Prof. Geikie has shown, 1 



1 << 



Prehistoric Europe," pp. 336, 349. 



THE FLOOD, ETC. 89 

through all the latter part of the Glacial period the land 
of Europe was far more elevated and extended than at 
present, reaching far out into the Atlantic, while the 
Mediterranean was so diminished in size as to leave 
both Spain and Italy joined to the oposite mainland of 
Africa. These bridges between Europe and Africa ap- 
pear to have opened to the animals of Europe a way of 
escape from the Glacial cold, and of return when the 
climate became less severe. 

The last of the four or more warm intervals, interca- 
lated through all the Glacial period, between ages of in- 
tensest cold, was the Champlain period of Prof. Dana. 
During this period Europe enjoyed a climate so warm 
and equable that as far north as the latitude of Paris 
there was a singular intermixture of temperate and semi- 
tropical vegetation, and an immense development of both 
animal and vegetable life. The elephant, rhinoceros, 
hippopotamus, lion, and tiger roamed again over the 
plains of England, and Scotland displayed very nearly the 
same forms of vegetable life as at present. These facts 
seem to be easily explained. The Glacial period 
was now waning to its close. The eccentricity of the 
earth's orbit had been reduced to about twice its present 
amount, and the cold was less intense, while the land in 
high northern latitudes was evidently to a considerable 
extent submerged. As the sun came to its mid-summer 
perihelion, giving to the northern hemisphere a summer, 
short indeed, but of intensest heat, the warm oceanic cur- 
rents, flowing freely northward, carried a warm tempera- 
ture almost to the arctic circle. By these causes, West- 
ern Europe was freed from ice and favored with a cli- 
mate warm, equable, very moist, and highly favorable to 
the rapid development of both animal and vegetable life. 

This state of things continued for some thousands of 



90 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

years, while the sun was slowly returning to its winter 
perihelion. Then the ancient reign of ice and winter was 
restored, but with less than its former severity. Glaciers 
again covered Northwestern . Europe as far south as Bel- 
gium, and the present climate of Lapland was carried 
down to the south of France. This last stage of the Gla- 
cial period is known in Europe as the Reindeer age ; be- 
cause, at that time, the reindeer, musk-sheep, and other 
arctic animals abounded, even in Southern France, with 
the hairy elephant, cave-bear, cave-lion, elk, ibex, and 
many others. 

We come now to a point of very great interest and im- 
portance. For if, in the variations in the eccentricity of 
the earth's orbit which have been explained and demon- 
strated by Mr. Croll, we have found the true cause of the 
Glacial period, as it now seems certain that we have, it 
follows that the time of the closing ages of this great 
period can be fixed with some approach to certainty. As 
the line of the apsides makes a complete revolution in 
about 21,000 years, 63,000 years ago the earth was at its 
January perihelion, as it is now, and its orbit had nearly 
returned to its minimum of eccentricity. The astro- 
nomical cause of the Glacial period was passing away ; but 
a large part of the earth's surface was buried deep in snow 
and ice, and in this intense glacial cold there was a great 
and stubborn power of self-perpetuation. It was many 
thousands of years after the producing cause of the Gla- 
cial period had ceased to act, before the earth was finally 
freed from the bonds of glacial ice and cold. It was 
without doubt at this point of time, 63,000 years ago, 
that the earth came to the height of the last Glacial age, 
the Reindeer period. Going back 10,500 years to the 
next preceding July perihelion, we find ourselves at the 
height of the Champlain period, 73,500 years ago. Com- 



THE FLOOD, ETC. 9 1 

ing down to 52,500 years ago, the earth is again at its 
July perihelion, the northern hemisphere is enjoying a 
second Champlain period, while in the southern hemi- 
sphere the last age of the Glacial oeriod is mildly run- 
ning its course. 

Coming to these conclusions with ideas adjusted to the 
brief periods of Usher's chronology, the inferences from 
them in respect to the time that man has lived on the 
earth are enough to take away our breath. For, in the 
abundant human remains which have been found in va- 
rious European caves associated with the deposits of the 
Glacial period, there seems to be evidence clear and deci- 
sive that men were living and had long been living in 
Europe in the Champlain period. Prof. Dana, whom we 
may certainly accept as representing on the one hand the 
highest level of American science, and on the other the 
soundest and most conservative Christian scholarship, 
affirms, without qualification, that these Palaeolithic hu- 
man remains date from the Champlain period, perhaps 
in part from the earlier Glacial period. 1 Prof. Geikie, less 
conservative, perhaps also less cautious and trustworthy 
in his conclusions, thinks the evidence clear that men 
were living in Europe at the beginning of the Glacial 
period, and probably in the Pliocene. 2 At all events, if 
Prof. Croll has given us the true explanation of the 
Glacial period, we seem, in the present state of our 
knowledge, to be shut up to the conclusion that men 
have been living on the earth for much more than 
75,000 years. This is a statement to which we shall 
find it very difficult to adjust our conceptions. If we 
are finally constrained to accept it as true, it will give 
a new meaning to the inspired teaching that we are 

1 " Geology," p. 322. 

3 " Prehistoric Europe," pp. 343-7.. 



92 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

the creatures of a God to whom, in his eternal existence, 
one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as 
one day. 

It will further appear that human development has 
borne a very striking analogy to the development of the 
whole system of nature. The development of the earth 
and the system of nature, through all the early geological 
periods, was exceedingly slow and prolonged ; while 
through the later periods it has gone on with ever-accel- 
erating rapidity. Prof. Dana makes the conjectural com- 
putation that the time-ratios of the Palaeozoic, Mesozoic, 
and Neozoic eras may be stated as 12:3: 1. As the evi- 
dence now stands, we seem constrained to believe that 
these same figures may be taken as representing not un- 
fairly the relative duration of the successive stages 
through which human development has pursued its in- 
conceivably slow and long-continued course. As we 
should infer must have been the case from a priori con- 
siderations, we must believe that man began his develop- 
ment at the very lowest point of the social and intellect- 
ual scale ; without experience, knowledge, or skill ; with- 
out language and without thoughts, more ignorant and 
more helpless than many of the lower animals, because 
destitute of those wonderful instincts with which they 
have been provided. From this low point he seems to 
have pursued the path of his slow upward progress 
through weary and interminable ages before he attained 
to the measure of social and intellectual culture charac- 
teristic even of the higher forms of savage life. With 
this view, all that geology has to teach us of the mode 
of life and socialcondition of Palaeolithic men is in perfect 
accord. Physically, the first human inhabitants of Europe 
were true men, hardly inferior in size, height, shape of 
the head, or weight of brain to those now living in the 



THE FLOOD, ETC. 93 

same localities ; yet in their intelligence, their skill in 
handicraft, and their social progress, they belonged to 
the rudest and lowest type of humanity. They lived in 
caves, and their few weapons and implements were rudely 
and coarsely chipped out of stone. But comparing to- 
gether the human remains which are found in those suc- 
cessive layers of deposits which indicate the lapse of 
ages, there is manifest a slow but steady improvement. 
The weapons are more skilfully formed, new and better 
implements are brought into use, until at length, before 
the close of the Glacial period, we find drawings of the 
various animals of the time not inartistically scratched 
on pieces of ivory or bone. The men of the Reindeer age 
had risen nearly or quite to the level of the modern Es- 
quimaux, who are held by many high authorities to be 
their lineal descendants and representatives. 

It will be observed that ever since the beginning of the 
Glacial period, the earth has been passing through a 
series of climatic ages, each, in a greater or less degree, 
with its own peculiar and distinctly marked character, 
each 10,500 years in length, and each reaching its cul- 
mination as the earth came to its January or its July 
perihelion. A distinct view of these several periods, in 
their order, will greatly help us to a clear understanding 
of the physical history of the earth since man has been 
living upon it. 

The Champlain period, according to the computation 
already given, reached its culmination with the July 
perihelion, 73,500 years ago, giving to Europe a warm, 
moist, and equable climate, with an immense develop- 
ment of vegetable and animal life of forms closely akin 
to those of the Miocene. In the Champlain period, man 
had already been living for a long time in Europe. 

The last Glacial period, known as the Reindeer period, 



94 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

was at its height with the January perihelion, 63,000 years 
ago. The cold was less intense than that of the earlier 
ages, yet the Scandinavian glaciers of this period ex- 
tended south as far as Belgium, and westward to the 
outer coast of the Hebrides. In this period, men were 
living with the reindeer, musk-sheep, and other arctic 
animals in the south of France. 

After the Reindeer age, the physical conditions of the 
Champlain period were restored. The gulf stream, bear- 
ing northward a far larger volume of heated water than 
it now does, gave Europe a warm climate even to the 
arctic circle. In this period, especially toward its close, 
the land of Europe was greatly elevated. The English 
Channel, the Irish Sea, and the North Sea disappeared ; 
Britain was joined to France, Holland, and Denmark ; the 
continent extended so far west as to include the Hebrides, 
and was probably joined by a continuous, or nearly con- 
tinuous, stretch of dry land to Iceland and Greenland. 
This age, for the sake of a name, we may call the Second 
Champlain period. It reached its height with the July 
perihelion, 52,500 years ago. Through this age the Gla- 
cial period was running its last stage in the southern 
hemisphere. 

The next age, culminating with the January perihelion, 
42,000 years ago, was very cold. A local glacier filled 
the Scottish Highlands, and dropped its icebergs off the 
coast into the sea. To designate this age, we may call 
it the semi-Glacial period. 

The earth came again to its July perihelion, 31,500 
years ago, giving to the northern hemisphere once more 
a South American climate, a short hot summer, followed 
by a long and intensely cold winter. The course and 
character of the gulf stream had become greatly changed, 
and northern Europe, which through the two Champlain 



THE FLOOD, ETC. 



95 



periods had been rilled with vegetable and animal life, 
lay bleak and sterile, with the cold and stormy climate 
of Patagonia. To distinguish this age from others, we 
might very properly call it the Patagonian period. 

The next January perihelion, 21,000 years ago, brought 
to the northern hemisphere conditions much more nearly 
resembling those now prevailing; while the last July 
perihelion, 10,500 years ago, gave the northern half of the 
north temperate zone once more the cold and stormy 
climate of Patagonia. 

Let us arrange these successive ages, with the number 
of years since the perihelion when each reached its cul- 
mination, in tabular form. They will stand as follows : 



Champlain ...... 




73>5°° 


Last Glacial, or Reindeer . 




63,000 


Second Champlain . 




5 2 k5oo 


Semi-Glacial . . 




42,000 


Patagonian ...... 




• 3^500 


Last January perihelion 




21,000 


Last July perihelion . 




. 10,500 


Number of years since the present age 


began, about 


5,000 



I have spoken of the men of the Glacial period as the 
old Palaeolithic race. It is now time to notice the wide 
distinction between the Palaeolithic and Neolithic races 
of ancient Europe. The immensely long period during 
which the earliest human inhabitants of Europe used only 
stone for their weapons and implements, having as yet 
no use or knowledge of any metal, is called the Stone 
age. After this came the age of Bronze, and still later 
the age of Iron. But the Stone age was itself divided 
into two ages, by a gap far wider and more complete 
than that which separated the Stone age from the Bronze, 
which are called, for the sake of distinction, the Palaeo- 



9& FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

lithic, or ancient Stone age, and the Neolithic, or later 
Stone age. So far as is now known, the Palaeolithic race 
had disappeared from Europe many thousands of years 
before the Neolithic tribes appeared to occupy the vacant 
ground. Prof. Geikie positively declares that no Palaeo- 
1 ithic remains have been found in Europe of a date later than 
the Reindeer age. 1 The Palaeolithic race appears to vanish 
from our knowledge with the end of the Glacial period, 
while there seems no reason to believe that Neolithic 
men have been in Europe for more than 10,000 years. 
Prof. Geikie indeed speaks of Neolithic remains, found in 
Britain, of the Second Champlain age. This term may 
be correct as describing the character of the articles 
found ; it cannot be true as applied to the men who made 
them. These articles are older by at least 25,000 years than 
any other Neolithic remains as yet discovered, and must 
have been made by some more cultivated tribe of the 
Palaeolithic race, before their departure from Europe. 

In the disappearance of the Palaeolithic people there is 
nothing mysterious or unaccountable. They were few in 
number, poorly armed, and almost helpless in the pres- 
ence of the powerful and terrible wild animals which 
abounded all around them. They were simple savages, 
low down, except in the artistic faculty, even in the scale 
of savage development. They did not till the soil, prac- 
tised no arts of husbandry, but depended for subsistence 
upon the chase, and the flesh, perhaps the flesh and milk, 
of the reindeer. Reindeer were in fact their chief de- 
pendence ; and when, with the coming in of the Second 
Champlain age, these useful animals migrated to the 
north, they were followed by their human neighbors and 
dependents, who thus, in the course of a few centuries, 
entirely disappeared from Southern and Central Europe. 



1 << 



Prehistoric Europe," p. 360. 



THE FLOOD, ETC. 97 

There seems to be sufficient ground for the belief that 
these Palaeolithic families ultimately made their way to 
North America; either eastward, by way of Siberia and 
Behring Strait, or northwestward, by the then open over- 
land route, to Iceland and Greenland. If this supposi- 
tion is correct, we have probably found, in these earliest 
known representatives of the human family, the ances- 
tors not of the Esquimaux alone, but of the other oldest 
American races. 

When, many thousands of years later, Neolithic men 
first appeared upon the scene, all things were entirely 
changed, and Europe was like another world. The 
climate, the flora, and the fauna * of the continent had 
become very much as they are at the present time. As 
Prof. Geikie has observed, the transition from Palaeolithic 
to Neolithic society is a transition from utter savagery to 
comparative civilization. The latter were, indeed, no 
more than rude barbarians, by no means as far advanced 
as the Gauls, Britons, and Germans of Caesar's time ; but 
they were tillers of the soil, they had the domestic ani- 
mals, which have ever since remained the servants of 
man, and practised with no little skill many of the simpler 
mechanic arts. In particular, they engaged in regular 
miningoperations to obtain the flint nodules which abound 
in the chalk cliffs of England. From the flint thus ob- 
tained, by the use of grindstones and other appliances, 
they were able to make sharp and highly polished weapons 
and tools. 

Since the advent of Neolithic man there has been no 
break or interruption in the course of human existence 
and activity in Europe, but only a slow and steady un- 
folding into the order of things which now exists. In 



1 The collective animal life of a country is called its fauna ; the collective 
vegetable life, its flora. 



98 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

later ages the Neolithic race was crowded into a narrow 
compass by the coming in of other peoples, but in 
Caesar's time they were still represented by the Aqui- 
tanians of Gaul and the non-Celtic Britons, and they are 
represented to-day by the Basques of the northwest of 
Spain. From this fact the inference seems unavoidable 
that, if the whole of Central and Southern Europe was 
submerged by that great catastrophe, the first appearance 
of Neolithic man in Europe must have been since the 
Flood ; and in all the Neolithic remains thus far discov- 
ered there appears to be nothing to disprove such an 
hypothesis. Yet we cannot regard these Neolithic men 
as belonging to the family of Noah. As will hereafter 
appear, they must be accounted one of the, perhaps, many 
families which survived the Flood. 

We come now to the great and difficult problem of 
the Flood itself. For the question of the Flood is a 
problem, a great problem, and one very difficult to solve. 
The circumstantial and graphic account in the Book of 
Genesis, sustained as it is by the hardly less particular 
and vivid traditions of many and widely separate nations, 
we are constrained to accept as proof positive and con- 
clusive that there was a Flood in the days of Noah, by 
which the whole of the then known world was buried so 
deeply beneath the waters that all terrestrial life was de- 
stroyed from its surface, excepting the single human 
family and the few animals preserved in the ark. But the 
sudden sinking of so great a region of the earth's surface 
to so great a depth, and its almost equally sudden re-ele- 
vation, must have been, taking the whole movement to- 
gether, one of the greatest convulsions through which 
any part of the crust of the earth has passed in any re- 
cent geological age. But generally, such changes of level, 
even partial sinkings and risings of no more than forty or 



THE FLOOD, ETC. 99 

fifty feet, have written their own history in the disturbed 
strata of the earth's surface, just as clearly and unmistak- 
ably as the geologist can record it upon the printed 
page. It would therefore seem entirely impossible that 
a catastrophe so tremendous as this sudden submergence 
of so large a portion of the earth's surface must have 
been, should not have left its history fully recorded over 
every part of the area covered by the Flood. But here 
the strange fact confronts us, that no such self-written 
history of this tremendous cataclysm can be found. As 
yet, neither in dislocated strata, nor in deposits of marine 
remains, nor in the action of water, has any certain trace 
or sign of the Flood of Noah been discovered. And not 
only so, this great and sudden submergence was widely 
at variance with the analogies of all the later geological 
ages. Previous movements of this character had usually 
been very slow and long continued ; protracted, often, 
through hundreds of years. As compared with this, also, 
they had been of very limited extent. In the great sub- 
mergence of the Glacial period, the sinking of the land 
seems nowhere to have exceeded 1,500 feet. But in the 
Flood, the land must have sunk in the course of a few 
weeks to a depth of 5,000 feet; and then it must have 
risen again so rapidly, that in just a year from the begin- 
ning of the movement, the family of Noah disembarked 
safely upon dry land. 

With these facts before us, we can only frankly admit 
that, scientifically considered, the problem of the Flood 
has not yet been solved. We may confidently believe 
that with the progress of geological discovery, and the 
more thorough examination of the regions of Southeast- 
ern Europe and Southwestern Asia, this difficulty will be 
removed ; that the self-written history of the Flood will 
be found and clearly interpreted to the world. But in 



IOO FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

the present state of our knowledge all that can be said 
upon the subject seems to be comprehended in the fol- 
lowing points : 

i. The reason why no dislocations of strata were left 
to be the record and the evidence of this great catas- 
trophe was, probably, that the whole of the submerged 
region sank and rose evenly, and en masse, so that no dis- 
locations of strata were produced. The same thing was 
true of Scotland, as Prof. Geikie points out, in its alter- 
nate sinkings and risings at the close of the Glacial 
period. 1 

2. The reason why no sea-shells, or other marine remains, 
have been found on the land submerged as the result of 
this great breaking in of the waters, may have beeh that 
the submergence was too brief in its duration to allow of 
any colonizing, or of any growth and decay, of marine 
life. But it may just as well be true, and this perhaps is 
the more probable supposition, that our want of knowl- 
edge upon this point is owing simply to our ignorance of 
existing facts ; — that the Flood did leave behind it in 
marine remains, perhaps abundant remains, a record of 
itself not yet discovered or understood. 

3. The Flood was a most important feature in the plan 
of this world's history, and the whole course of events in 
the preceding geological ages had been so ordered as to 
prepare the way for such a catastrophe. Both the story 
of the Flood, and the reason for the Flood, as they are 
given in the Book of Genesis, are in perfect accordance 
with the facts of history. Southwestern Asia was the 
birthplace of the human family. Here our race had its 
central seat, increased most rapidly in numbers, made its 
largest social development, and, in the course of ages, 
had most corrupted its way before the Lord. It was a 



1 << 



Prehistoric Europe," p. 409. 



THE FLOOD, ETC. IOI 

rude, incapable race, without mental culture or social or- 
der. By a sad necessity, as population grew dense, it 
became the prey of social anarchy, and filled the earth 
with violence and blood. From such a race, in such cir- 
cumstances, nothing further could be expected in the un- 
folding of the grand destinies of humanity. It was 
therefore the divine purpose to clear the ground of their 
encumbering presence, so that a field might be prepared 
for the free, the vast, the manifold development of a new, 
a nobler, a more capable race. That this was the pur- 
pose of the flood we are distinctly told in the Book of 
Genesis ; that this was its actual result, we know from 
the whole history of the family of Noah. For thousands 
of years this one family occupied the whole of this grand 
central region of the earth's surface in sole and quiet pos- 
session, with but little trouble or interference from the 
various Turanian tribes which had survived the Flood in 
more distant parts of the earth. But this great catas- 
trophe was no sudden or miraculous event. For more 
than 100,000 years, from the beginning of the Glacial 
period, a train of mighty causes had been steadily at 
work, making all things ready for this appointed Deluge, 
for this great change in the population of the globe, in 
the unfolding of the destinies of mankind. For — 

4. The Flood was the last throe of the Glacial period. 
Whatever else may be proved or disproved concerning 
the Flood by future discoveries, this point we may hold 
as already fixed beyond question. Toward the close of 
the Glacial period, as we have seen, the weight of the 
enormous accumulations of ice and snow had become so 
great over vast regions in the higher latitudes of the 
northern hemisphere, that the crust of the earth at last 
gave way, and great depressions of the surface occurred 
over widely extended areas. These depressions at the 



102 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

north caused of necessity an equally extensive upheaval 
of the land in other regions further south. This eleva- 
tion seems to have taken place along a broad belt of the 
earth's surface in the lower half of the north temperate 
zone. All through the penultimate Glacial period, the. 
Champlain period, and the last Glacial period, the basin 
of the Mediterranean is believed to have been so much 
elevated that Italy and Africa were united by dry land. 
In the latter part of the Second Champlain period, the 
upheaval was so great in central Europe that the North 
and Irish seas had disappeared, the continent extended 
far westward into the Atlantic, beyond the present west- 
ern coasts of Ireland and the Hebrides, while a continu- 
ous or nearly continuous stretch of dry land seems to 
have joined Scotland and Norway to Iceland and Green- 
land. 

In this great belt of the earth's surface thus bulged up- 
ward, there were from age to age many changes and os- 
cillations of level ; but as a whole the upheaval must have 
continued as long as its producing cause continued. But 
this cause still existed, in undiminished force, for many 
thousands of years. The excessive eccentricity of the 
earth's orbit, the cause of the glacial cold, had passed 
away, but in that cold itself there was a great and obsti- 
nate power of self-perpetuation. After the Second 
Champlain period, through the two ages which we have 
called the semi-Glacial and the Patagonian periods, the 
cold continued so great that the weight of ice in northern 
latitudes must have increased rather than diminished. 
We are thus brought down to the age which culminated 
with the January perihelion 21,000 years ago ; and we can 
see clearly that until this period had given to the 
northern hemisphere something like the climatic con- 
ditions of the present time, no effectual inroads had been 



THE FLOOD, ETC. IO3 

made upon these ancient accumulations of ice. Through 
this age, in all the warmer districts of the north, the ice 
must have been slowly melting away. But in the next 
age, the age which reached its height with the July peri- 
helion 10,500 years ago, with its short hot summers fol- 
lowed by long and intensely cold winters, just as is now 
the case in the southern hemisphere, the ice must have 
gained ground again in all the higher latitudes. 

We thus come to the conclusion that not until the 
time, something like 8,000 years ago, when the sun, com- 
ing back to his winter perihelion, had begun to give to 
the northern hemisphere once more the long summers 
and short mild winters which we now enjoy, did the rapid 
and final melting away of the old glacial ice begin. In 
the course of some 2,000 years, as we may calculate, 
this process must have been complete ; the weight which 
had so long sustained the great upheaval in the latitude 
of central and southern Europe had been finally removed. 
And so, about 6,000 years ago, as we may reasonably be- 
lieve, the fulness of the time had come, the hour of doom 
for the antediluvian world. Not slowly and gradually, as 
such upheavals had often subsided in earlier geological 
time, but with a sudden and awful crash, the uplifted 
lands went down. They descended, not to their normal 
level simply, but, under the tremendous momentum of 
their fall, to abysmal depths ; so that the waters of the 
ocean flowing in buried the submerged lands to the 
depth, as we must suppose, of six or eight thousand feet. 
But such a submergence could not continue. From all 
sides of the round globe a mighty pressure would be 
instantly exerted upon these too deeply sunken lands, 
forcing them back again to their proper level. Thus, in 
the course of a few months, the highlands and mountain 
tops had risen above the waters, and Noah and his family 
had stepped forth upon dry land. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

AFTER THE FLOOD. 

The waters of the Flood had abated, and the huge 
bulk of the Ark lay stranded upon the heights of Ararat, 
there, through long years, to crumble into dust. The 
mountains and high table-lands were already dry and 
ready for human occupation, but not the lowlands. It is 
probable that hundreds of years were yet to pass away 
before the Mesopotamian plains could become again the 
dwelling-place of men. 

Noah and his family had stepped forth once more upon 
solid land, beneath the bright shining sun, and into the 
fair, free air of heaven. Their long imprisonment, one 
hundred and fifty days of darkness and horror, unde- 
scribed and unimaginable, while, amid raging floods from 
beneath, and pouring torrents from above, the dead 
bodies of their perished fellow-men floating in thousands 
around them, and their own clumsy, fragile refuge beaten 
hither and thither, they knew not where, or to what end, 
— this long imprisonment, long and dark and dreadful, 
had at last come to an end, and the progenitors of a new 
race had stepped forth into a new world. But a world 
how awful in its solitude ! The old hum and tumult of 
life was everywhere hushed into the silence of the dead. 
Save the handful of living things that had come forth 
from the Ark, there was nothing upon all the dry land 
that moved, or breathed, or lived. There were no flocks 
or herds upon the plain ; no beasts of prey prowling in the 

104 



AFTER THE FLOOD, 105 

wood ; no birds, singing from the tree-tops, or winnowing 
the depths of the silent air ; no insects sporting in the 
sunbeams ; no reptiles gliding stealthily upon the ground. 
All was silent, desolate, and dread. To Noah and his 
sons, as from the Kurdish Mountains they looked afar 
over the dreary, lifeless waste, it must have seemed as if 
they stood alone, alone in an empty world. 

It must have seemed to them not only a silent world, 
but in very truth a new world ; a world in which the very 
aspects and conditions of nature had been essentially 
changed. " I will establish my covenant with you," said 
their great Preserver; " neither shall all flesh be cut off 
any more by the waters of a flood. And this is the 
token of the covenant which I make between me and 
you, I do set my bow in the cloud ; and it shall come to 
pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow 
shall be seen in the cloud." This is a distinct affirmation 
that up to that time the bow had never been seen in the 
cloud ; and of this fact there can be, apparently, but one 
explanation. That great convulsion of the elements 
which had just passed away had, for the first time, puri- 
fied the atmosphere, and made it clear and transparent 
as we see it now ; permitting the rays of the sun to come 
unobstructed to the human eye, and so making possible 
the perfect refraction of light, and the forming of the 
bow upon the cloud. This being so, the world before 
the Flood must have been but a dim and murky world, 
always enveloped in thick and misty vapors, through 
which the sun by day and the moon by night seemed but 
dull, brazen orbs, and the depths of the clear blue sky 
were never. seen. And when, coming forth from the 
Ark, Noah beheld this great change, saw for the first 
time the sun flooding the earth with glory in the fulness 
of his radiance, looked for the first time into the depths 



106 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

of the azure skies and the spangled heavens by night, it 
must have seemed to him indeed that old things had 
passed away, that God was making all things new. 

The lot of Noah in this common life of ours was cer- 
tainly a most remarkable one. In those early and simple 
times no man could have held a higher, a more honored, 
a prouder position than that filled by him. I say, in 
those early and simple times ; for we must remember 
that the times were, socially, very early and very simple. 
The human race was yet in its childhood. It seems to 
have been long after Noah's time, how many centuries 
no man can tell, that, with hieroglyphics and picture- 
writing, men made their first rude attempts at written 
language. As yet there seems to have been neither 
writing nor any thing to write. Mental activity there 
was none. The intellect, with all its godlike powers, as 
yet lay dormant, its mighty activities hardly begun. In 
the mechanic arts, indeed, some progress had been made, 
or a vessel like the Ark could never have been built. 
But intellectually and socially, even the most favored 
families before the Flood would seem to have been no 
farther advanced than were the North American Indians 
when our fathers first landed on these western shores. 

In those early and simple times, I repeat, no man could 
have held a higher or prouder position than that held 
by Noah. He held this position by virtue of his per- 
sonal dignity and excellence of character. In the midst 
of a corrupt and evil world, " Noah was a just man, and 
perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God." 
And so, again, no man could have stood higher than he 
in the divine favor. Not greater was the favor of God 
to Abraham his friend, than to this earlier father of the 
faithful ; not more freely and familiarly did he communi- 
cate with him : with no greater or richer blessings did 



AFTER THE FLOOD. 10/ 

he crown him. But more even than this. By the ap- 
pointment of his divine Protector and Friend, Noah 
stands the honored father of all the nations of the civ- 
ilized and enlightened world. In this all the teachings 
of history, and of ethnological and philological science, 
are in perfect agreement with the Book of Genesis. From 
the three families of the sons of Noah have sprung all 
the nations and races which, from that day to this, have 
been concerned in the grand unfolding of humanity, in 
the upbuilding of God's earthly kingdom.' 

And now let us take our stand with this rescued fam- 
ily, and cast a hasty glance over what is known to us, 
first of the world as it then existed, and then of the his- 
tory of this family, these new progenitors of our race, 
through the long and eventful period which was yet to 
elapse before the sacred history should open full and 
clear with the calling of Abraham. We shall find the 
Ark and the family of Noah, not on the summit of 
Mount Ararat, but upon some one of the inferior heights 
which lie along the southern border of Kurdistan. Ara- 
rat, in ancient times, was a country and a kingdom, cor- 
responding in part to the modern Kurdistan, with its 
capital on the shores of Lake Van. By " the mountains 
of Ararat," it is evident that no particular peak was in- 
tended. Sir Henry Rawlinson assures us that this ex- 
pression was used in ancient times to designate the bold 
and lofty range which overhung the plains of Assyria to 
the north of Nineveh. 

We can hardly be mistaken in accepting these chap- 
ters as the account of an eye-witness, describing in simple 
language what he himself had seen, and with no thought 
of any thing beyond that comparatively narrow region 
which was all the world to him. He had seen the waters 
come pouring in, filling the valleys and plains, rising 



108 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

steadily and rapidly until the hills were covered, then 
still rising until the distant mountain tops were sub- 
merged, and the solitary Ark floated alone in what 
seemed a world of waters, with not a spot or point of land 
to be seen to the utmost horizon on every hand. To 
Noah and his sons, as they came forth from the Ark, it 
must have seemed that all things living upon the dry 
land had perished from all the face of the earth, except- 
ing only the few animals which they themselves had pre- 
served. But this was not so. We now know that but a 
small part of the earth's surface, comparatively, was cov- 
ered by the Flood, and that vast regions, untouched by 
the waters, were still filled with their ancient life. 

The tenth chapter of Genesis is the Book of the Gen- 
erations of the sons of Noah. This chapter is the founda- 
tion of human history. The unfolding of these three 
branches of the family of Noah into their several tribes 
and nations has been the great subject of philological 
and ethnographic science. It has been fully traced out 
and clearly elucidated, and is now well understood. The 
history of this three-fold family is the history of the civil- 
ized world. But never at any time since the days of 
Noah himself have the races and nations of his descend- 
ants made up the half of the population of the globe. 
The Tartars, Mongols, Chinese, and Malays of Asia ; 
the old Neolithic population of Europe, now represented 
by the Basques of the Pyrenees, and the Finns of the 
north ; the various native races of America, and the ne- 
groes of Africa, — of none of these races do the ancestors 
have any place in the tenth of Genesis ; not one of them 
can be connected by any tie, whether of language or af- 
finity, with any branch of the family of Noah. They are 
all of them evidently descended from families undestroyed 
by the Flood. For the sake of a name, these races may 



AFTER THE FLOOD. IO9 

all be grouped together and called Turanian — a name of 
a merely negative significance, meaning only that the 
tribes and nations to which it is applied are neither Ham- 
ite, Semitic, or Japhetic. 

The old Palaeolithic Europeans were, in this sense of 
the word, Turanian, and are believed by many eminent 
ethnologists to be still represented by the oldest races of 
North America. The Neolithic men, a small, swarthy, 
dark-haired, long-faced race, which after the Flood, and 
perhaps before the Flood, overspread a large part of Eu- 
rope, and which are now represented by the Basques and 
Finns, were also Turanian. Their small stature, swarthy 
complexion, and dark hair seem to indicate a southern 
origin ; so that there may be reason for the surmise that 
they were preserved through the Flood on some of the 
high mountains of Southern Europe. Mr. Sayce tells 
us that the old Accadian Chaldaeans spoke an agglutin- 
ative language akin to that of the Turks and Finns. 1 
From this statement, however, we are not to infer that 
these early Chaldseans were Turanian in race. It only 
means that their language had as yet only begun that 
long process of development by which, in the course of 
ages, it passed from its primitive Turanian to a Semitic 
form. Some have supposed that Tidal and his " nations'' 
were Turanian, as may have been the case. That the 
original Medes, with their Magian religion, were Turan- 
ian seems entirely clear. After a thousand years of con- 
flict these primitive Medes were subdued by their Aryan 
or Japhetic neighbors, giving their name, and in part 
their religion also, to their conquerors. 

If some prophetic glimpse of the future could have 
been given to Noah, as he stood with his rescued family 
upon the heights of Ararat, he might well have been 



1 if 



Chaldsean Account of Genesis," p. 20. 



HO FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

satisfied with the destiny appointed for his race. He 
would have seen the sprightly children of Ham, at first far 
outstripping the slower growth of their brethren, spread- 
ing themselves through Babylonia, Southern Arabia, 
Egypt, Ethiopia, and India, and building up, with aston- 
ishing rapidity, a magnificent civilization, upon which 
even now we look back with admiring wonder, and 
stretching the long arms of their commercial and social 
influence even to distant regions of the earth. 

Then he would have seen the children of Shem coming 
forward in their turn, to take their place, and play their 
great part in the mighty drama of human history. Out 
of this Semitic race, he would have seen springing the 
imperial dominion of Nineveh, with its long lines of 
Assyrian kings; and the wandering tribes of that strange 
Arabic race, their hand against every man, and every 
man's hand against them, who once, in the days of Sara- 
cenic grandeur and dominion, have given proof of the 
high qualities with which they are endowd, but the day 
of whose great part in the unfolding destinies of man- 
kind has not yet come. But more and greater than 
these, he would have seen, among the mountains of 
Palestine, a little kingdom, politically feeble and unim- 
portant, but morally and spiritually bearing in its bosom, 
as in another ark, the hopes and destinies of the world ; 
— the kingdom of the children of Abraham the friend of 
God, containing within itself that Church of God through 
which all the nations of the earth should be blessed. 

Last and slowest but greatest of all, he would have 
seen the family of Japhet, the prolific wide-spreading 
Aryan or Indo-European race, rising to its imperial place, 
its grand and long-enduring dominion. He would have 
seen this noblest family of his sons spreading its vigorous 
and numerous branches both east and west, subduing 



AFTER THE FLOOD. Ill 

and civilizing the great peninsula of India, swaying the 
destinies of Asia in the vast empire of the Medes and 
Persians, bursting upon the world in a sudden blaze of 
glory in the freedom and splendid civilization of Greece, 
and slowly building up the strong and sure foundations 
of law, of political order, and of universal empire, in the 
old republic of Rome. And then, in far-distant ages, 
ages which even yet have but half run their course, he 
would have seen the Celtic, the German, and the Sla- 
vonian branches of the same grand Japhetic race working 
out a new and higher, because a Christian, civilization, 
and lifting the world into a condition of light and knowl- 
edge, of freedom and happiness unknown and undreamed 
of before. Thus does Noah stand before us in proud pre- 
eminence, the father of the civilized world. From him, 
through the three families of his sons, has come every 
thing that makes the Christian nations of to-day all that 
they are in the glorious reality of the present time, in 
the yet more glorious promise of the time to come. 



CHAPTER IX. 

FROM NOAH TO ABRAHAM. 

The Hamites, before their separation after the building 
of Babel, appear to have devised a simple hieroglyphic 
system of writing. This great invention was afterward 
developed by the Cushites of Chaldaea into the cuneiform 
or wedge-shaped characters so long in use by the Baby- 
lonians, Assyrians, and Persians ; and by the Egyptians 
into a highly elaborate hieroglyphic system, which as- 
sumed a sacred character, and which they employed for 
public inscriptions for thousands of years. For private 
use, and especially for writing on papyrus rolls, they sim- 
plified and condensed their hieroglyphics into a kind of 
running hand, known as the hieratic or priestly charac- 
ter. In addition to these modes of writing, the Egyp- 
tians very early became adepts in pictorial representation, 
which they used very profusely upon the walls of their 
public buildings and their tombs. By the use of these 
instrumentalities, long before the time of Abraham, the 
Chaldseans and Egyptians had filled their several coun- 
tries with inscriptions and pictorial delineations, repre- 
senting almost every thing in their history, their religion, 
their social customs, and their manner of life. This was 
more especially true of the Egyptians. It would seem 
that no other people has ever existed filled with so in- 
tense a longing to perpetuate the memory of themselves 
to the most distant ages of time. A great part of these 
earliest records of human history are still in perfect pres- 

112 



FROM NOAH TO ABRAHAM. 113 

ervation. Strange to tell, the papyrus rolls, safely stored 
in the mummy cases of the dead, have proved almost as 
imperishable as the granite of Syene. There are many 
of these rolls still in good condition and perfectly legible, 
which were written hundreds of years before the time of 
Abraham. 

Within the past half century, these old inscriptions, 
which, for thousands of years, no man was able to read, 
have been deciphered, and have yielded up their secrets 
to the knowledge of the modern world. At the same 
time, the new science of philology has been steadily and 
surely tracing out the connection and relationship of the 
various families of languages which have been gradually 
formed among the many nations of the three branches of 
the family of Noah. The astonishing revelations of these 
two lines of scientific investigation have thrown a flood 
of light upon the history of our race through that long and 
before almost unknown period extending from the flood 
to the call of Abraham. Within this period there was a 
vast social and political development in all the branches 
of Noah's family, for which the four hundred years al- 
lowed by Usher's chronology is totally inadequate. Most 
clearly the time between Noah and Abraham is to be 
reckoned not by hundreds, but by thousands of years. 
But if the true explanation of the Flood is to be found 
in the astronomical and geological causes already con- 
sidered, there was ample time for this development. It 
seems quite impossible that the Flood should have oc- 
curred less than 6,000 years ago. 

The treasures of knowledge, so long buried in the ruins 
of the ancient world, modern learning has as yet but just 
begun to bring to the light. In the interpretation and 
explanation of these earliest records of human history 
there is still much of uncertainty, much that is not un- 



114 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

derstood. Upon many very important points the best and 
highest authorities are widely at variance. But, on the 
other hand, there is very much in these ancient records, 
and much of the highest value and importance, in the in- 
terpretation of which there is no difficulty, which is 
clearly known and understood. In the light of these 
new and wonderful revelations, the history of all the 
branches of the family of Noah, from the very days of 
the Flood, may be traced in all its main outlines and 
most important features with a considerable degree of 
confidence. 

By the researches of philologists, laboriously and 
minutely comparing together all the languages which, in 
the long course of ages, have sprung up among the de- 
scendants of Noah, three points have been made clear. 

1. The children of Shem, Ham, and Japhet remained 
together, living as one people, for a long period, prob- 
ably for some hundreds of years, after the Flood. They 
lived together long enough to begin the development 
among themselves of a new language, common in its 
essential features, to them all ; a language entirely dis- 
tinct from any ever spoken by any Turanian people, as 
it was from that of Noah and his sons before the Flood. 
This primitive post-diluvian language was the parent 
stock from which have sprung all the languages of all 
the tribes and nations of the sons of Noah. All these 
languages, and only these, are what are known as inflec- 
tive languages, — languages which form the verbs with 
varying terminations to express moods, tenses, person, 
and number; their nouns and pronouns with the like 
changes to mark their gender, number, and case. 

2. After living thus for a long time with the Hamites 
and Shemites, the children of Japhet were suddenly, com- 
pletely, and permanently separated from their brethren, 



FROM NOAH TO ABRAHAM. 115 

to pursue from that time on, for many ages, a course 
entirely independent and distinct. Thus cut off from all 
Hamite and Shemite influences, the various tribes of the 
sons of Japhet developed gradually that great and widely 
spread family of languages, known to modern science as 
Indo-European, — the languages of the Hindus, Persians, 
Medes, Phrygians, Greeks, Romans, Celts (the ancient 
Gauls and Britons), Germans, and Slavonians. AD these 
languages are clearly, many of them closely, akin to each 
other ; while they are radically unlike and distinct from 
all Hamitic and Semitic forms of speech, having no other 
relationship with them than that derived from their com- 
mon but very remote parentage. 

3. Between the Shemites and Hamites no such separa- 
tion took place. From that day to this, these two races 
have remained closely associated, and, to a large extent, 
inseparably intermingled. The Hamites settled in Baby- 
lonia, Egypt, Palestine, and Ethiopia. The Ethiopia of 
antiquity was a region of vast extent in both Asia and 
Africa. Asiatic Ethiopia extended along the coast of 
the Indian Ocean all the way from the Indus to the 
Straits of Babelmandeb, comprising Southern Arabia 
and the modern Beloochistan. African Ethiopia lay to 
the south of Egypt along the coast of the Red Sea and 
the Gulf of Aden, comprising the countries now known 
as Nubia, Abyssinia, and Somauli Land. Of the Shem- 
ites, Elam was the tribe and kingdom of Chedorlaomer, 
located on the east of the Tigris over against Babylonia. 
The children of Asshur occupied Assyria, while the 
families of Arphaxad, Lud, and Aram seem to have been 
settled in Northern and Western Mesopotamia, in South- 
ern Armenia, and Syria. Joktan, of the race of Arphaxad 
and Eber, became the father of the southern and older 
race of the Shemite Arabians, to which the Ishmaelites 
were joined at a later day upon the north. 



Il6 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

The Hamites were a quick and sprightly people, and had 
very soon far outrun their slower brethren in the race of 
social advancement. Taking their antecedents and sur- 
roundings into the account, the civilization which rapidly 
sprung up among them, in Babylonia, Egypt, and Asiatic 
Ethiopia, must be pronounced the most brilliant and sur- 
prising development in history. But there was never 
any family of Hamitic languages. The Hamite language 
was simply the old language of the three families before 
the Dispersion ; a language agglutinative or Turanian as 
yet in its essential features, caught and fixed, at a some- 
what later stage of its growth, by an early civilization, 
and a sacred and unchangeable form of hieroglyphic 
writing. This language held its ground in Egypt for 
more than 3000 years. Outside of Egypt, the tribes and 
languages of both the Shemites and the Hamites passed 
on into a new development, assuming the type, both of 
language and of race, which is known in history as Shem- 
ite, or Semitic. The Hebrew, the most important of the 
so-called Semitic languages, was not distinctively a Shem- 
ite language. It was the common language of the Cana- 
anite peoples, both Hamite and Shemite. The Phoeni- 
cians, regarded generally by historians, from their lan- 
guage and national character, as a Semitic people, were, 
ethnically, not Shemites but Hamites, like the other 
tribes of Canaan. The Hamitic Cushites of Southern 
Arabia and Abyssina passed through the same change. 
As their languages indicate, they had become fully Semi- 
tized long before the Christian era. The Chaldaeans 
themselves, the originators of the Hamitic culture and 
civilization, long before the time of Nebuchadnezzar, 
had become as fully Semitized as their neighbors of 
Assyria. The Chaldaean language, in which the Book of 
Daniel is written, is very closely akin to the Hebrew. 



FROM NOAH TO ABRAHAM. WJ 

As we have already seen, we have the best authority 
for believing that by " the mountains of Ararat," in Gen. 
viii, was meant the lofty range which overhangs the 
plains of Assyria to the north of the site of ancient 
Nineveh. This view is certainly in perfect accordance 
with the scriptural narrative ; and we may accept it as 
pretty certainly true, that on some one of the eastern 
heights of this range the Ark rested after the Flood. 
From these mountains a vast ocean of waters stretched 
away over all the lowlands of Southwestern Asia, to the 
Indian Ocean upon the south, and the Mediterranean 
upon the west. Centuries were no doubt yet to pass 
away before these submerged lowlands would rise again 
to their former level, and the waters of the Flood finally 
disappear. But over the Zagros Mountains, to the south- 
east from the resting-place of the Ark, lay the ancient 
Iran, — that vast table-land, elevated 4000 feet above the 
level of the sea, which now forms the larger part of the 
kingdom of Persia. This high table-land, cleared of all 
terrestrial life by the Flood, now lay dry and once more 
inviting human occupation. To this great plateau it 
seems clear that the whole family of Noah, in the course 
of time, made their way. Here, as we have good reason 
to believe, they lived together for many generations as 
one people, until the single family of Noah had grown 
into a nation ; until they had begun to develop among 
themselves that new and peculiar language which was 
forever to distinguish their posterity from all the other 
families of mankind ; and until, at last, the waters of the 
Flood had finally disappeared. 

But the great Iranic plateau was dry and arid ; and 
now, in the rich plains of Southern Mesopotamia, there 
lay spread before them a far more inviting place of 
abode. And so, " It came to pass, as they jotirneyed from 



118 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

the East, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar, 
and they dwelt there/' 

Here they conceived a new idea and a gigantic plan. 
They would build for themselves a city, and a tower as 
high as heaven. They would do this, as the sacred record 
explains, that they might make themselves a name, and 
not be scattered abroad. In undertaking this huge work, 
they were moved by two powerful impulses. The first 
was a strong desire to bring their long wanderings to an 
end, and settle in permanent abodes. 1 They would build 
for themselves a city ; and not only a city, but a lofty 
tower, which should be seen over those vast plains as far 
as the eye could reach, and thus become a common rally- 
ing point and place of worship for all their tribes. Now, 
humanly speaking, there was in this stupendous plan 
nothing reprehensible ; it was altogether innocent and 
commendable. It is not spoken of as having been con- 
ceived in sin, or as having provoked the anger of God. 
It is simply intimated that it was not in accordance with 
the divine purposes. For it was not the will of God that 
the children of Noah should thus settle in one dense 
mass, to reproduce all the evil and corruption which had 
been swept away by the Flood. It was the divine pur- 
pose that they should be scattered abroad, to multiply 
and replenish the earth, to found many separate nations, 
and to inaugurate a various and manifold system of hu- 
man development. 

1 In the list of Babylonian Dynasties which has come down to us from 
Berosus, the earliest historical kings are given as a Dynasty of Medes. 
This seems to refer to the period during which the country was occupied by 
the as yet undivided family of Noah. For, as Philip Smith observes, the 
term Medes in this connection evidently means nothing more than a people 
who came from Iran. According to Berosus, the Medes ruled first in 
Babylonia, and after them the Chaldaeans. These Chaldseans — Akkad, as 
they call themselves in their cuneiform inscriptions, and as the name ap- 
pears in Gen. x, io — were Cushites of the family of Ham. Of the founding 
of this royal house we no doubt have an account in Gen. x, 8-10. 



FROM NOAH TO ABRAHAM. 119 

The second impelling force was a powerful impulse to 
build ; to do some great thing, and get themselves a name. 
This was an impulse which continued to act with prodig- 
ious and unabated energy, in all the early nations, in both 
the eastern continent and the western, for hundreds, 
perhaps for thousands of years. The race was still in its 
pristine vigor, full of an overflowing and irrepressible 
energy. The mighty powers of the human mind were 
beginning to work, and must find some means of display- 
ing themselves, some adequate mode of exercise and ex- 
pression. But the scope of their powers was as yet very 
narrow. It embraced but two factors, physical force and 
a rude mechanical skill. With these two factors alone 
they must work, if they worked at all ; and with these 
they did work, and to such purpose that all succeeding 
ages have, looked in utter amazement upon the results of 
their toil and skill. Modern engineers have asked in 
wonder by what possible means those early nations, 
knowing little of the engineering art, could have ac- 
complished their huge undertakings, could, in many cases, 
have moved and placed such immense masses of stone. 
The answer is very simple. These works were accom- 
plished by the united labor of countless human hands. In 
those early days power was despotic, human life was held 
very cheap, men were plenty, and all inspired with a com- 
mon feeling. It was, comparatively, an easy thing to 
get together a vast multitude of men of the lower classes 
to carry out any great national undertaking of the king 
and the priests. It seems to have been the first break- 
ing out of this mighty impulse which set the children of 
Noah upon the building of their gigantic tower. It was 
not the will of God that this work should be accom- 
plished ; and he so divided their counsels and confused 
their language, that they left off to build, and were scat- 



120 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

tered abroad. We have no reason to suppose that in 
this catastrophe there was any miracle involved. The 
divergence of race, language, and national character in 
the then united families must, by this time, have become 
quite sufficient to account for the breaking up of their 
plans and the scattering of their tribes, under the pres- 
sure of a work so arduous, and of the despotism of kingly 
power, by which alone such a work could have been car- 
ried forward. 

The despotic power by which, without doubt, the 
building of Babel, like all the other gigantic works of a 
similar character which so abounded in the ancient East, 
was undertaken and carried on, is fully explained in the 
tenth chapter of Genesis. At this time, as we know from 
their subsequent history, the Hamites were far in ad- 
vance of their brethren of the other two tribes, holding a 
foremost and controlling position in the common coun- 
cils. Of the Hamites, again, the Cushites were the lead- 
ing family. "And Cush begat Nimrod." That is to say, 
at this time Nimrod was the great leader and chief of the 
Cushite clan. This position gave him the leadership of 
all the Hamites, and so also of the three united tribes. 
" He began to be a mighty one in the earth " ; " and the 
beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and 
Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar." We can 
hardly be mistaken in supposing that the tyranny of 
Nimrod had much to do in the breaking up and scatter- 
ing of the hitherto united family of Noah. To this des- 
potic authority, a new thing in their experience, the free- 
spirited shepherds would not submit. And so it came 
about that out of that land went forth Asshur, that is the 
family or clan of Asshur, and builded Nineveh, Reho- 
both, Calah, and Resen ; while the other families of the 
Shemites went each its own way, to the east, the north, 



FROM NOAH TO ABRAHAM. 121 

or the west. At the same time also, without doubt, and 
for the same reason, went forth out of that land the chil- 
dren of Japhet ; reascending the mountain slopes to the 
plains of Iran, and cutting themselves off for 2,500 years 
from all communication with their Hamite or Shemite 
brethren. 

Northeast from the land of Shinar, 1,500 miles across 
the dreary deserts of Iran, among the many streams 
which unite their waters to form the ancient Oxus, the 
modern Amoo Daria, lies another fair and fruitful land, 
which was destined to become the cradle of the great 
Japhetic race. To this region, known to them already, 
it may be through their former wanderings, the children 
of Japhet made their way. This new home of the 
Japhetic family was the ancient Bactria and Sogdiana; 
Bactria now forming the northeast corner of Afghanistan, 
Sogdiana the southeast corner of Turkestan. Here for 
many ages they dwelt together in quiet and prosperity, 
until they had become a new people, with a new lan- 
guage, and new religions ; until they had developed the 
germs of the great Indo-European family of nations and 
of languages. 

Having thus seen the three families of the sons of 
Noarusettled in their new and permanent abodes, let us 
now pass on to the days of Abraham ; and from this as 
yet far distant point of view, let us cast backward a 
rapid but comprehensive glance over the great develop- 
ments of the intervening time. 

Taking our stand thus with the Shemite Abram and 
Sarai his wife among the Hamites of Egypt, and casting 
our eyes backward over the history of the two races 
since the great Dispersion in the days of Nimrod, there 
opens before us a retrospect at which, to borrow the 
thought of one of the foremost of Oriental scholars, the 



122 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

head grows dizzy, as we vainly strive to measure it and 
take it in. The Egypt in which we find ourselves is not, 
as we might have supposed, a rude, simple, semi-barba- 
rian state, in the early youth of its long history. It is 
a great and magnificent kingdom, which, ages before, 
had already reached the highest point of its populous- 
ness and prosperity, its artistic, literary, and scientific 
culture, and the splendor of its civilization. 1 We have 
always known that, after the time of Abraham, Egypt 
remained for sixteen centuries, until the final conquest 
of the country by the Persians, not only a great and 
powerful kingdom, but, during much of that time, one 
of the mightiest empires of the world. But now comes 
the astounding announcement, and on evidence which 
we find it very difficult to call in question, that before 
the time of Abraham Egypt had already had a history 
to which, except in the single case of China, there has, 
to this day, been no parallel among the nations of men. 

Manetho, an Egyptian priest, living under Ptolemy 
Philadelphus about 275 B. c, left on record a list of 
thirty-one dynasties of kings who, according to records 
preserved in the ancient temple at Sebennytus, had 
reigned in Egypt before the conquest of the country by 
Alexander the Great in 332 B.C. This list, at least in re- 
spect to the earlier dynasties, was long regarded as of 
little value. But of late four other lists have come to 
light, all of them as old as the Hebrew Exodus, and all 
of them agreeing in all essential particulars with the list 

1 Abraham's visit to Egypt must have occurred not far from the close of 
the Twelfth Dynasty. The monuments and inscriptions of Senoferu, the 
twentieth king of Egypt, and the last king of the Third Dynasty, have come 
down to our times. The successor of Senoferu was Cheops, or Suphis I, 
the builder of the Great Pyramid. These kings must have lived more than a 
thousand years before the time of Abraham. Yet even in their day the art 
and civilization of Egypt are said by the best Egyptologists to have reached 
a point hardly surpassed in any subsequent age of Egyptian history. See 
Brugsch-Bey's " History of Egypt under the Pharaohs," vol. i, pp. 63-6. 



FROM NOAH TO ABRAHAM. 1 23 

of Manetho. One of these lists is from an inscription of 
Rameses II, for whom the oppressed Hebrews " built 
treasure cities, Pithom and Raamses." In addition to 
these ancient lists, monuments and inscriptions of so 
many of- the individual kings of the several dynasties 
have now been discovered, commencing with those of 
Senoferu, the last king of the Third Dynasty, that all 
reasonable ground of doubt seems to have been removed, 
and the correctness of Manetho's list, in the main, to have 
been fully established. These dynasties were not all of 
them consecutive. Between the Seventh and the Elev- 
enth Dynasties, and between the Twelfth and Eigh- 
teenth, there were periods of revolution and division, 
when two, and sometimes three, dynasties were reigning, 
or claiming to reign, at the same time, in different parts 
of Egypt, or over the border in Ethiopia. It seems now, 
however, to be established beyond question, that by far 
the greater part of this almost incredible number of 
kings followed each other in as regular succession as that 
of the sovereigns of England for the past 800 years. 

It was near or after the close of the Twelfth Dynasty 
that Abraham made his memorable visit to Egypt, On 
the evidence already referred to, it is now believed that 
from the time of Menes, the first king of united Egypt, 
to the end of the Twelfth Dynasty, at least sixty-five 
Egyptian kings, some of them reigning over but part of 
the country, followed each other in regular succession. 
For any exact chronology of this period there are no 
data. But in his " History of Egypt under the Pharaohs, 
derived entirely from the Monuments," Brugsch-Bey, our 
latest and highest authority upon Egyptian antiquity, has 
given a cautious and reasonable calculation, based upon 
the principle of allowing to each reign the average length 
of thirty-three years, the time usually assigned to each 



124 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

generation of human life, upon which he has based a 
conjectural chronology which we can hardly hesitate to 
accept as not beyond the truth, especially when we re- 
member the longer duration of human life in those early 
times. 1 This calculation carries back the accession of 
Menes to the throne of Egypt to about 4,400 B. c. 
The Call of Abraham is placed at about 2,000 B. c. ; so 
that when the patriarch stood before Pharaoh on the 
occasion of his visit to Egypt, the history of that coun- 
try, as a civilized and well-established kingdom, already 
dated back 2,400 years, if the chronology suggested by 
Brugsch-Bey is correct. 

These are words easily spotcen ; but when we try to 
really comprehend the meaning of such a history as this, 
before the time of Abraham, to borrow again the thought 
of Renan, the head grows dizzy at the vastness of the 
retrospect which opens before us. The whole history of 
Rome, from the legendary founding of the city in 753 
B. C, to the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 
A. D. 1453, covered a period less than this by 200 years. 
But the first and last age of Roman history was but the 
feeble, shadowy dominion of a single city; while at both 
the beginning and the end of this long period of 2,400 
years, Egypt was a populous, civilized, well-organized, 
and powerful kingdom. As Brugsch-Bey has observed, 

1 The oldest book in existence, so far as is known, is a papyrus roll now 
in the Imperial Library at Paris, written by Phtha-hotep, a son, or other 
near relative of the seventh king of the Fifth Egyptian Dynasty, according 
to Brugsch-Bey's reckoning, more than a thousand years before the time of 
Abraham. It is a book of thirty-five moral precepts, based upon filial 
obedience. The writer says of himself: " I have become one of the old 
men of the land ; I have accomplished one hundred and ten years with the 
grace of the king and the favor of the elders." — Brugsch-Bey's " Egypt," i, 
92, and Philip Smith's "Ancient History of the East," p. 70. It is clear 
from this passage that in the time of this writer one hundred and ten years 
were looked upon, as we now look upon fourscore years, as the ordinary 
limit of a mature old age, even for men living amidst the luxuries and 
excitements of a royal court. 



FROM NOAH TO ABRAHAM. 12$ 

we must go back to a time earlier than Menes to find the 
first development of Egyptian civilization, science, and 
art. It seems unquestionable that the Hamites were 
already a civilized, and, in some respects, a highly culti- 
vated people before their settlement in Egypt. But 
what shall we say of the time required for the immense 
development of the Hamite race, implied in this fact, 
since the days of the Dispersion? Clearly the time em- 
braced in this period must be reckoned by hundreds of 
years. 

Before the time of Menes, the Hamite race had evi- 
dently already spread itself over a great part of the 
immense region which it occupied in historic times. 
Immediately after the Dispersion (or perhaps the great 
movement began before the Dispersion), the tribes of 
this race began to spread themselves rapidly southward 
along both sides of the Persian Gulf, thence eastward 
through the modern Beloochistan, and westward through 
Southern Arabia, until the Cushites, or Ethiopians, 
crossed the Straits of Babelmandeb, and occupied a vast 
region in Africa, upon the upper waters of the Nile. 
Before the time of Abraham, as appears from the inscrip- 
tions of the Twelfth Dynasty of Egyptian kings, Southern 
Arabia and Somauli Land were opulent and populous 
countries, abounding in all rich and precious things, like 
the Sheba and Ophir of the time of Solomon. Baby- 
lonia was the cradle of civilization and science. With 
the Akkad, or Cushite Chaldaeans, of this country, says 
Sir Henry Rawlinson, " originated the art of writing, the 
building of cities, the institution of a religious system, 
and the cultivation of all science, and of astronomy in 
particular. The language of these Akkad . . . was 
in fact the language of science in the East, as the Latin 
was in Europe during the Middle Ages." It is believed 



126 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

that the Chaldaeans were in advance even of the Egyp- 
tians in their scientific culture and the development of 
their civilization. Here we have the explanation of the 
fact that the Egyptians were already a civilized and culti- 
vated people when Menes first united them into a king- 
dom. They brought their civilization with them from 
the Euphrates to the Nile. 

How, and by what route they found their way into 
Egypt are questions which have been greatly debated by 
scholars. Until within the past few years the opinion 
prevailed that the Egyptians were an offshoot of the Afri- 
can Ethiopians, and that they entered Egypt from the 
south, following downward the course of the Nile. This 
view is now abandoned. The Egyptians were not Cushite 
Ethiopians ; they were the Mizraim, the descendants of 
Mizraim, the second son of Ham. The first capital of their 
kingdom was not in Upper Egypt, but at Memphis, far 
down the Nile, in the immediate neighborhood of the 
Isthmus of Suez. At the same time, it is true that the 
first family which reigned at Memphis originated at This, 
in Upper Egypt. It seems evident that before the time 
of Menes the whole country had been settled, and that 
the several nomes, or districts, had each its petty capital 
and seat of religious worship. The course of events ap- 
pears to have been as follows: Some hundreds of years 
after the time of Nimrod, when the rapidly multiplying 
Hamites were already becoming crowded in their early 
settlements, a great westward migration took place of 
the tribes of Mizraim and Phut, from their earlier seats in 
Chaldaea or Southern Arabia. These early Hamites 
were an active, pushing, commercial race. They had, no 
doubt, already become acquainted with the magnificent 
region which lay, inviting settlement, upon the banks of 
the Nile, and thither they directed their course. They 



FROM NOAH TO ABRAHAM. 1 27 

seem to have entered Africa, either together, or the 
Mizraim in advance of their brethren, by the Isthmus of 
Suez ; when the Mizraim immediately occupied the val- 
ley of the Nile, while the tribe of Phut followed the 
coast westward, and settled in " the parts of Libya about 
Cyrene." 

Many hundreds of years later there was another and 
greater migration from the shores of the Persian Gulf to 
the West. This was the famous movement of the Phoeni- 
cians and other tribes, which made up the family of 
Canaan, the youngest son of Ham. This migration took 
place before the Call of Abraham ; for, in Gen. xii, 6, we 
read that when Abraham first entered the country prom- 
ised to his posterity, " the Canaanite was then in the 
land." These tribes overran the whole of Western 
Syria, from the borders of Arabia to the Orontes. It 
was, apparently, a wing, or section, of this migrating 
host which entered Egypt by the Isthmus of Suez, made 
common cause with the local kings of Xois in the Delta, 
expelled the feeble line of the Thirteenth Dynasty from 
Thebes, and became masters of all Egypt without a 
battle. These were the Hyksos, or Shepherd Kings, 
who reigned in Egypt for more than two hundred years, 
and until after the time of Joseph. The Hyksos were 
no rude, destroying barbarians. They were a civilized 
and capable race, who imparted to the Egyptians quite 
as much as they received from them, and left the king- 
dom stronger and more flourishing than they found it. 1 

1 There seems to be good reason for the belief that the Pharaoh of Gen. 
xii, was the first Shepherd King. When Abraham first entered Palestine, 
" the Canaanite was then in the land " ; the Amorites Aner, Eshcol, and 
Mamre "were confederate with Abraham"; the Southern Hittites of 
Hebron were his neighbors and friends. But Hebron, as we read in Num- 
bers xiii, 22, was built seven years before Zoan in Egypt, the capital of the 
Shepherd Kings. It seems clear from these data, that at the time of Abra- 
ham's visit the Hyksos had already begun their invasion, were already estab- 
lished at Zoan. The simplicity of manners which characterize the Egyptian 



128 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

What was the impelling force in this great national 
migration, whether it was the conquering career of 
Chedorlaomer, or some other and different cause, is as 
yet unknown. 

The meagre population of Western Syria before this 
Canaanite invasion seems to have consisted only of the 
Rephaim, Zuzim, Emim, and other, apparently, Shemite 
tribes, which are uniformly spoken of as a race of giants. 
We have already seen reason to believe that the men 
before the Flood, and with them Noah and his sons, 
were a coarse, gigantic race ; and it may well have hap- 
pened that, amid" the mountain fastnesses of Western 
Syria, these rude and primitive descendants of Shem 
preserved the physical characteristics of their antedil- 
uvian ancestry. Or, it may possibly have been that there 
remained some pinnacle of Lebanon uncovered by the 
waters of the Flood, on which some solitary antediluvian 
family was preserved, to spread itself in after-ages 
through the mountains of Syria. 

Let us now return to the children of Japhet, whom we 
left pursuing their isolated development far to the East 
upon the head waters of the Oxus. Here the Japhetic 
family remained together for a long period of time, until 
they had developed that new and peculiar language 
which was destined to branch, in after-ages, into all the 
languages of the great Indo-European family of nations. 
In the course of a few centuries this result had been 
attained, and the Japhetic people had so multiplied in 

king and his court, the footing of friendliness and equality on which the 
patriarch is received, and, in a word, the whole tenor of the narrative seem 
to mark this Pharaoh as the first Shepherd King, as yet but just commencing 
the conquest of Egypt, rather than one of the magnificent and haughty 
sovereigns of the Twelfth Dynasty, to whom, as to all native Egyptian kings, 
every jhepherd was an abomination. By the time of Joseph, the Shepherd 
Kings had fully adopted the manners and ideas of their Egyptian subjects ; 
and to them also the nomad shepherds of Syria and Arabia, always crowd- 
ing themselves into the Delta, had become an abomination. 



FROM NOAH TO ABRAHAM. 120, 

numbers, that they began to send off colonies toward the 
West. The Eastern branch of the race, the fathers of 
the Hindus, Medes, and Persians, remained in Bactria 
for many centuries ; probably until long after the time of 
Abraham. The Western colonies, destined in far-distant 
ages to unfold into the Japhetic races of Asia Minor and 
Europe, branched off from the parent stock so early, 
that their language is the only evidence remaining of 
their connection with the Aryan race. Neither the 
Greeks, the Romans, the Celts, the Teutons, nor the 
Slavonians seem to have retained any tradition or re- 
membrance of their Eastern origin, or of their kinship 
with the Hindus and Persians. 

These colonies evidently moved westward through 
Southern Turkestan, Northern Persia, Media, Ararat, or 
Kurdistan, and Armenia. And yet, at the earliest period 
to which the light of history or authentic tradition 
reaches back, no one of these districts was occupied by a 
Japhetic people. The inhabitants of all alike appear to 
have been Turanian in language and in blood. The 
explanation of this fact is obvious. A great Scythian 
invasion had come in to expel the Japhetic colonies from 
their new seats, and drive them on : the fathers of the 
Phrygians, Lydians, Greeks, and Romans, to the south 
of the Black Sea ; the ancestors of the Celts, Germans, 
and Slavonians to the north of the same sea, to be lost 
for ages in the vast wilderness of Northern Europe. 

The Japhetic people still remaining in Bactria, and call- 
ing themselves Aryas, or Aryans, are comparatively well 
known to us through the traditions and sacred books of 
their descendants, the Hindus, and the ancient Medes 
and Persians. The Hindu Vedas are the sacred books of 
the old Aryan race before its division, and its final settle- 
ment in India and Persia. The earliest of the Vedic 



13° FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

hymns are no doubt older, they may be much older, than 
the time of Abraham. From these sources of informa- 
tion we know that these old Aryans were a pastoral and 
agricultural people, who had made considerable progress 
in civilization, lived not in tents, but in houses, and had 
the art of working in gold, silver, and bronze, though not 
in iron ; that polygamy was not practised among them, 
that the marriage and family relations were regarded by 
them as peculiarly sacred, and that woman was held in 
the same respect and honor among them as among their 
kindred, the ancient Germans. 

But the most interesting thing about these old Aryans 
is their religion. It seems pretty certain that they re- 
tained the knowledge and worship of the one true God, 
the God of their father Noah, until long, after their set- 
tlement in Bactria. Shem lived five hundred years after 
the Flood, and may well have been with the clan of 
Asshur at the building of Nineveh. And so it is not un- 
reasonable to suppose that Japhet was still alive to cross 
the deserts of Iran with his children to their new home 
in Bactria. During the life of Japhet, and of his sons of 
the first generation, the religion of Noah could not well 
be forgotten. It had not been wholly forgotten at the 
date of the oldest Vedic hymns, nor long afterward, when 
Zoroaster appeared, the great restorer of the worship of 
the one living and true God. 

In what is known to us of the history of these old 
Aryans, we can see clearly how the knowledge of the true 
God was gradually, very gradually, obscured, as the dark- 
ness of ignorance and superstition settled down over the 
minds of a spiritually uninstructed people, until the relig- 
ion of Noah, in nearly all the families of his children, was 
debased, first into polytheism, and then into a degrading 
idolatry. These simple-minded children of nature saw 



FROM NOAH TO ABRAHAM. 131 

manifestations of the unseen Divinity in the vitalizing 
light and heat of the sun, in the blue vault of the starry 
heavens, in the awful forces of nature, in the fruitfulness 
of the earth, and in the pure element of fire ; and as seen 
in these several manifestations of his power, his majesty, 
and his glory, they called him by different names. They 
worshipped him as Indra, Mitra, Varuna, and Agni ; but 
under all these names there was, at first, in their concep- 
tion, but one God. So sang one of the oldest of the 
Vedic psalmists : " They call him Indra, Mitra, Varuna, 
Agni ; . . . that which is One, the wise call it in 
divers manners." But gradually, to the minds of a simple 
and childish people, these names began to be invested 
with personality, and to be worshipped as separate and 
individual gods. Then, especially among the Hamites, 
the people began to fix upon certain objects, animate, 
and inanimate, as being, through their distinguishing 
characteristics, types and symbols of their several gods, 
and to worship them with divine honors. Such were the 
two stages through which the monotheism of Noah de- 
generated among his children, first into polytheism, and 
then into animal worship and idolatry. 

Here and there, however, in all the three branches of 
the posterity of Noah, the knowledge of the one true 
God was long preserved, sometimes as the hereditary 
faith of a particular family, sometimes as the secret mys- 
tery of a priestly order. In Abraham's time Melchize- 
dek, king of Salem, was a priest of the most high God. 
Fifteen hundred years later, the same doctrine was still 
held as a most sacred and secret mystery by the Egyp- 
tian priests. " Egypt," says Philip Smith, " had in fact 
two religions : one which Herodotus saw captivating the 
eyes of the people with pompous ceremonies, and govern- 
ing their lives by minute observances ; the other, of 



I3 2 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

which the priests barely allowed him to catch a glimpse, 
and even that glimpse he was too reverent to repeat. . . . 
At length, however, modern science has, in the language 
of the ancients, ' lifted the veil of Isis ' ; and in the 
Egyptian papyri, we read the secrets of Egyptian theol- 
ogy. The first revelation is somewhat startling. Jam- 
blichus quotes from the old Hermetic books the state- 
ment : ' Before all the things that actually exist, and 
before all beginnings, there is one God, prior even to the 
first God and king, remaining unmoved in the singleness 
of his own unity.' And if now, like the prophet on his 
mission to Egypt, we ask by what name we shall announce 
this God, the sacred books of Egypt give the very same 
answer — an answer which the initiated took with them to 
the grave, inscribed on a scroll as their confession of faith : 
' NUK PU NUK '— < I am that I am! Other papyri tell 
us 'that He is the sole generator in heaven and on earth, 
and that He is not engendered — that He is verily the sole 
living God who has engendered Himself — He who is 
from the beginning — He who created all, but is Himself 
uncreated. '" ' 

Far more important, and productive of great and far- 
reaching results, was the preservation of the faith of 
Noah among the Aryans of Bactria. We have seen that, 
at the date of the earliest Vedic hymns, the primitive 
monotheistic faith of the Japhetic race was already be- 
coming obscured and changed into polytheism and 
nature-worship. This declension, however, was very far 
from extending to all the families of the Aryan people. 
Century after century the old faith still held its ground, 
until at last a great reformer arose. This reformer was 
Zoroaster, or, at least, the great reaction against the 
growing polytheism of the Aryan race was personified 



i <> 



Ancient History of the East," p. 196. 



FROM NOAH TO ABRAHAM. 1 33 



• 



under this famous name. Whether Zoroaster was the 
actual apostle of a new faith or not, the rise of the 
Zoroastrian religion proved one of the grandest relig- 
ious reformations of human history. This new move- 
ment for the restoration of the old Japhetic faith pro- 
duced a great and deadly schism in the Aryan com- 
munity. There were wars and fierce contentions, resulting 
in a final division of the race. The polytheistic party 
retired (or perhaps were driven by Scythian invaders) 
to India, where they became the fathers of the modern 
Hindus; the Zoroastrians moved westward, and devel- 
oped into the kindred nations of the Medes and Persians. 
This old Zoroastrian religion and race have still their few 
but honored representatives in the Parsis of India, 
whither they were driven by the Mohammedan con- 
querors of their native land. 

With the later developments of the Iranian or Persian 
religion, first into dualism, the worship of two Gods — 
Ahuramazda, the God of light, goodness, and truth, and 
Ahriman, the god of darkness and evil, — and then into 
the Magian worship of fire and the elements, which, as 
Sir Henry Rawlinson seems to have shown conclusively, 
was a new element of the national religion, borrowed 
from the Magi of the conquered Turanian Medes, we are 
not at present concerned. The point of special interest 
to us is that the religion of Zoroaster, as we know from 
the Zend-Avesta, the Zoroastrian bible, still preserved in 
an imperfect form by the Parsis, approached wonderfully 
near to that of Noah and the patriarchs. Ahuramazda 
was the spiritual mighty One, the Creator and Ruler of 
the universe, the Author of all good. Ahriman was as 
yet a mere tempter, like the Satan of Gen. iii. This best 
and truest of all unrevealed religions, unless, indeed, we 
may believe that Zoroaster was as truly led and taught 



134 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

of God as were Noah and Abraham, inculcated virtue 
and purity of life, required that Ahuramazda should be 
worshipped by prayer and praise, taught the immortality 
and everlasting blessedness of the good, and also, as is 
believed, the resurrection of the body. Cyrus and his 
Persians were worshippers of Ahuramazda, and the words 
of Isaiah were certainly not without meaning when he 
said : " Who raised up the righteous man from the east, 
called him to his foot, gave the nations before him, and 
made him rule over kings? . . . That saith of Cyrus, 
He is my shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure." ' 
Whether Zoroaster lived before or after the time of 
Abraham, we have, at present, no means of knowing. 
But we do know that when the great father of the faith- 
ful, and of the earthly Church, was walking by faith in 
the one living and true God, the same faith was still liv- 
ing and fruitful among the children of Japhet in the dis- 
tant East. 

1 Is, xli, 2 ; xliv, 28. For a brief, but comprehensive and admirable ac- 
count of the Aryans and their religions, see Philip Smith's "Ancient His- 
tory of the East," chapter xviii, Harper's Student Series, a small and inex- 
pensive volume which ought to find a place in every library. 



CHAPTER X. 

THE PATRIARCHAL DISPENSATION. 

At the beginning of the 17th chapter of Genesis we 
read that when Abram was ninety years old and nine, 
God appeared unto him and said : I am the Almighty 
God ; walk before me, and be thou perfect. From this 
passage we may get the exact idea of that form of the 
Church which we sometimes call, and not incorrectly, the 
Patriarchal Dispensation. This was the first and simplest 
form of the Church as a permanent institution, which was 
destined to grow and unfold, one Church in varying 
forms, until it should subdue and fill the world. 

The Patriarchal Church stands by itself, more widely 
separated from Judaism than Judaism was from Chris- 
tianity, but unfolding by a natural development into Ju- 
daism, as the latter unfolded into Christianity. As it 
had no written revelation, so, except in the family, it 
had no established forms or methods of religious instruc- 
tion and worship. It had no regular organization. Every 
member of that early Church stood by himself, holding 
no necessary relations with any other out of his own fam- 
ily. The economy of that Church was limited entirely 
to the individual and the family. But within this narrow 
sphere its provisions were ample ; and its elevating, 
sanctifying power produced some of the purest and 
holiest men who have ever adorned the Church and 
blessed the world. 

Under the Patriarchal Dispensation, each head of a 

135 



136 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

single family, like Jacob ; or chief of a petty shepherd tribe, 
like Abraham ; or king of a little city, like Melchizedek, 
was at once prince and priest of his own people ; not only 
offering sacrifices in their behalf, and leading their simple 
worship, but far more than this, privileged to receive 
direct personal communications from God, and to expect 
the special guidance of his providence and grace. These 
intimate personal relations with God proved to these 
early saints a means of spiritual training of marvellous 
power. That training produced in Abraham one of the 
noblest and most perfect saints that the world has ever 
seen. He became the friend of God, living in childlike 
and habitual communion with him, believing his word 
with undoubting faith, trusting constantly in his providen- 
tial guidance and care, and rendering to every expression of 
his will an instant and perfect obedience. In all the 
records of human history there is nothing more wonder- 
ful, nothing which stands out in more striking contrast 
to all its surroundings, and to all that had gone before, 
than the piety of Abraham. As one of the earliest ex- 
amples of that divinely given religion, in its full devel- 
opment and manifestation, which was destined to save 
and transform the race of man, God raised up and set 
before the eyes of men, for their instruction and imita- 
tion, a character of such simplicity, excellence, and strength, 
such moral elevation, grandeur, and beauty, as to compel, 
not the approval alone, but the profoundest veneration 
of all mankind in every age. 

The history of the Patriarchal Dispensation sets before 
us in a striking light the infinite goodness of God. It 
shows us the sedulous care with which he ever adapts the 
ministrations of his grace to the varying wants and cir- 
cumstances of men, with which he is always doing all 
that can be done for their spiritual good. The time had 



THE PATRIARCHAL DISPENSATION. 1 37 

not yet come when his Son could appear in human form 
to rear the perfected fabric of his kingdom. It was not 
yet possible even to give to the world a written revelation 
of his truth, and to found his Church as a regularly con- 
stituted and abiding organization, and thus to bring some 
small portion at least of human society under its steady 
control, its purifying and sanctifying power. But, as his 
compassionate eye surveyed the dark and troubled world, 
he did discern here and there a few individual souls who 
were capable of being brought under the power of his 
truth, into sympathy with his own divine character, into 
obedience to his will ; and to the instruction, training, 
and guidance of these few and scattered individuals, 
he gave himself with all the gentleness and patience of 
infinite love. 

And now let us pass on to consider briefly the circum- 
stances which fixed the conditions of the existence and 
the character of the Church in this its earliest form. We 
have seen how, as the Hamite tribes became settled in 
fixed habitations in Chaldasa, Ethiopia, and Egypt, and 
there grew up into populous and flourishing communities, 
the light of civilization sprang up among them, spoken 
language was reduced to writing, and the human mind 
began to awake to the exercise of its hitherto dormant 
powers. But, unhappily, step by step with this advance- 
ment had been the progress of heathen superstition, and 
the rigid, iron authority, of prescription and priestly rule. 
To the Hamites, life was an unchangeable routine, fixed 
to its minutest particulars, by custom and the authority 
of a powerful priesthood. The religious beliefs, usages, 
and forms of worship of the whole body of the people, 
high and low, were rigidly fixed. Of any freedom in 
thought, opinion, or worship, there was not the shadow 
or possibility. The Hamite communities were thus 



138 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

sealed against the entrance of any new and purer form of 
doctrine or of worship. It was only among the simpler 
families of the children of Shem and Japhet that men 
could be found with minds strong enough and free enough 
to receive new revelations from God, and to worship him 
in spirit and in truth. But among the Shemite and 
Japhetic peoples, as we have already seen, there were here 
and there men and families, perhaps many such, who in 
the time of Abraham still worshipped the God of Noah, 
and were capable of being taught by his Spirit, and of 
being led by his providential hand. 

It was, however, but very little that could be done 
among such men for the founding and building up of the 
kingdom of God. They were simple barbarians, without 
a written language,* without arts or acquired knowledge, 
and incapable, from their circumstances and manner of 
life, of any rapid or immediate progress in civilization. 
The religion of Abraham, Melchizedek, and Job was the 
only form of true religion which could, as yet, find any 
place among even true worshippers of God in circum- 
stances like these. It was not possible to found among 
them an organized and permanent Church, nor to give to 
the world through them a written revelation of divine 
truth. But one thing could be done for their spiritual 
help. A kind and gracious God could visit personally the 
soul of each true worshipper, of each head of a God-fear- 
ing family, instructing and guiding him by himself 
alone, through the ministrations of angels, or the visions 
of the night. This he did. Nor are we to suppose that 
this earliest dispensation of the mercy of God was limited 
to the few patriarchal saints whose names have been re- 
corded in the Bible. But for what we call the accident of 
the capture of Lot with the people of Sodom, we had 
never known that Melchizedek, King of Salem, was a 



THE PATRIARCHAL DISPENSATION. 1 39 

priest of the Most High God, the prototype of that 
greater Priest whose sacifice of himself was once for all 
to take away sin. Zoroaster, a priest and apostle of the 
same true faith, greater than Melchizedek, finds no men- 
tion in the sacred volume ; and no more do those long 
generations of the many Aryan families of whose faithful 
worship of the God of Noah the great and wonderful re- 
ligious movement inaugurated by Zoroaster was the 
proper outgrowth and fruit. We cannot doubt that 
among the simple shepherds of Syria, Mesopotamia, and 
Bactria, there was many another man who, like Abra- 
ham, Melchizedek, and Zoroaster, worshipping with a 
simple faith the God of Noah, was like them also in- 
structed, guided, and abundantly blessed by the ministra- 
tions of his grace. 

Still, amidst the ignorance, the spiritual darkness, and 
the growing superstition of the times, the number of such 
true worshippers must have been comparatively small. 
Probably not many generations had passed away before 
they had entirely disappeared from the earth, except in 
the single family of Jacob, and among the disciples of 
Zoroaster. With no written revelation, with no inspired 
prophet or teacher, and no established religious institu- 
tions or sacred observances to keep alive the knowledge 
of the truth, the vague religious traditions of the family 
of Noah were soon obscured and lost ; the true God was 
no longer worshipped or even known, until, excepting 
the Hebrews, almost all the families of mankind had set- 
tled down to a belief in their own peculiar superstition, 
the practice of their own false religion. 

The Patriarchal Dispensation filled its place in the 
plan of Divine providence and grace, accomplished its 
work, and passed away. The place which it filled, the 
work which it accomplished, let us now pass on to corir 



140 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

sider. That would be a very inadequate view of this 
earliest form of the Church which should regard it simply 
as an example of the gracious dealings of God with a few 
individual men. That early dispensation was appointed 
to lay deep and broad the foundations of the Church for 
all coming time ; and those foundations it did lay, work- 
ing out results as important and as lasting as the Church 
itself. 

The Church of God rests on two corner-stones, which 
are, first, piety and holiness in the individual man; and, 
secondly, family religion, by which the piety of the 
fathers is perpetuated in their children. These founda- 
tions once laid, the kingdom of God was to advance, first 
into the form of a regularly constituted and lasting 
Church, as under the Jewish Dispensation, with its full 
and written revelation, and its elaborate organization ; 
and then into an all-pervading power, controlling tri- 
umphantly the whole system of human society. But 
before this grand superstructure could be reared, the 
foundations must first be laid ; and for this work the 
Patriarchal Dispensation was happily fitted above all 
other agencies and instrumentalities which the grace of 
God has ever employed. The orifice of the Patriarchal 
Dispensation was thus to develop and establish forever 
the two foundations of the Church, personal holiness, 
and family religion. Of both these principles, this early 
dispensation raised up, and set on high, bright, illustrious 
examples to be copied and imitated in his personal char- 
acter by every friend of God, in his family by every 
father, to the end of time. 

As Abraham was the most perfect example of the 
patriarchal saint, so in his history we may see most 
clearly how the dispensation under which he lived ac- 
complished its appointed work. Abraham had no writ- 



THE PATRIARCHAL DISPENSATION. 141 

ten revelation to instruct him tully in the mysteries of 
divine truth, to teach him what was right and what was 
wrong in the wide domain of morals ; but he had what 
for him was far better, the personal instruction and 
guidance of God. God had called him from his fath- 
er's house by his own voice ; had led him step by step 
through all his career by his providential hand ; had 
appeared to him again and again in the visions of the 
night and by his angels ; had entered with him into an 
everlasting covenant. Under this divine training Abra- 
ham had enjoyed a special and wonderful spiritual edu- 
cation. He had learned to look upon God as his kind, 
familiar Friend ; to look to him at all times, with 
simple confidence, for instruction and for aid ; to be- 
lieve implicitly in his word ; to obey with instant, un- 
questioning obedience, every indication of his will. 
This intimate fellowship and sympathy with God, this 
steadfast trust in him and obedience to his will wrought 
in him their proper fruits. They gave him a character 
of such strength and dignity, such purity and noble- 
ness, as to make him a bright example to be revered 
and imitated by the children of men in every age. All 
this was the fulfilling of the purpose of God in Abra- 
ham's history. He meant by this bright example, at 
the first founding of his earthly Church, to teach his 
people in every age the true character of that personal 
holiness which should make them acceptable in his sight. 
He meant to teach them that as Abraham trusted in 
his providence and grace, so they also might trust ; as 
lie was taught and guided by the Spirit of God, so 
might they be taught and guided ; as he believed the 
promises and obeyed the will of God, so ought they to 
believe and obey ; and that even such as were the fruits 
of holiness in his character and life, ought to be those 
wrought in their own. 



142 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

Nor was that example given in vain. The example 
of Abraham has ever been, to all men who have had 
in their hands the Word of God, a perpetual lesson of 
faith, obedience, and love. His example has been fol- 
lowed, his piety has been copied and reproduced in every 
age of the Church, and shall continue to be, ever more 
widely and perfectly, until it becomes the all-pervading 
and governing principle of a regenerate world. It was 
thus that the personal dealings of God with the patri- 
archal saints taught the world, as in those early times, 
the childhood of our race, no other instrumentality could 
have taught it, the nature and character of true religion, 
and of the relations which ought to exist between the 
pious soul and God ; the nature and character of that 
personal holiness by which men are made the sons of 
God. 

Let us now pass on to consider how this early dis- 
pensation laid the second foundation of the Church in 
the religion of the family. The law of the family is one 
of the most essential, the most vital features of the divine 
economy in the affairs of men. That law perpetuates the 
character of parents, not their moral character alone, but 
their intellectual and physical character as well, in the 
sucessive generations of their children. Adam lived a 
a hundred and thirty years and begat a son in his own 
likeness, after his image. So it has always been. Children 
are born in the image and likeness of those from whom 
they derive their being. Wickedness and sensual indul- 
gence in parents are very likely to entail the same vicious 
character upon their children, while by the beneficent 
action of the same law, virtue and righteousness in the 
heads of a family perpetuate themselves, generation after 
generation, in their children. Thus it is that while the in- 
iquities of the fathers are visited upon their children, 



THE PATRIARCHAL DISPENSATION. 1 43 

God bestows the richest fulness of his blessing upon the 
children's children of them that love him and keep his 
commandments. This is the basis of that covenant into 
which God has ever been ready to enter with the families 
of his people. 

It was in accordance with this fundamental feature of 
his plan of grace, that God made use of the peculiar cir- 
cumstances of patriarchal life to develop and establish 
one of the most important principles which was to bless 
his Church, and be the source of its strength, in every 
age. " For I know him," said the angel of the covenant 
of Abraham, " that he will command his children and his 
household after him, and they shall keep the way of the 
Lord." The patriarch was both prince and priest of his 
own people. And when he became a reverent wor- 
shipper, a servant and friend of the Most High God, it 
followed that he would rule his household in the fear of 
God, would day by day minister devoutly at the family 
altar, and wou(d diligently and faithfully teach his chil- 
dren to keep the way of the Lord. Thus was family re- 
ligion established, once and for all, as one of the two 
grand corner-stones of the Church of God. 

There are few things in the Bible more worthy of our 
careful study, than the effect of this institution of what 
we may call the church of the family, upon the patriarchs 
themselves. Wherever the patriarch removed with his 
numerous household, one of his first acts was to build an 
altar, that he might sacrifice unto the Lord and call upon 
his name. The circumstances of his position were thus 
eminently fitted to impress him with a sense of solemn 
responsibility, to give strength and dignity to his char- 
acter, and to produce in him that holiness of heart and 
life, without which he could never minister acceptably 
at the altar of God. It was his to perform the sacred 



144 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

rites of worship for his household, to deprecate the anger 
of an offended God for their sins, to seek for them his 
providential guidance, and to supplicate in their behalf 
all needed blessings. He thus held a mediatorial office 
between his household and his God ; and surely we can 
conceive of no circumstances of human action and re- 
sponsibility better fitted to develop piety and dignity 
of character in the patriarch himself, or to secure the 
richest fulness of the divine blessing upon his family. 

A more striking contrast is rarely seen between the 
different characters borne by the same man in different 
periods of his life, than that which fills us with wonder 
as we compare the dishonest, treacherous Jacob, com- 
pelled deservedly to fly for his life, an exile from his 
father's tent, with the aged Israel, the Prince of God. If 
any one would seek an explanation of this surprising 
change, let him read the simple record of the 35th chap- 
ter of Genesis: "And God said unto Jacob : Arise, go up 
to Beth-el and dwell there ; and make there an altar unto 
God, that appeared unto thee when thou fleddest from 
the face of Esau thy brother. Then Jacob said unto his 
household, and to all that were with him : Put away the 
strange gods that are among you, and be clean, and 
change your garments ; and let us arise, and go up to 
Beth-el, and I will make there an altar unto God, who 
answered me in the day of my distress, and was with me 
in the way which I went. . . . And God appeared 
unto Jacob again, when he came out of Padan-Aram, and 
blessed him. . . . And God went up from him in the 
place where he talked with him. And Jacob set up a 
pillar in the place where he talked with him, even a pil- 
lar of stone. And he poured a drink-offering thereon, 
and he poured oil thereon. And Jacob called the name 
of the place where God spake with him, Beth-el " (the 



THE PATRIARCHAL DISPENSATION. 145 

House of God). Who can wonder that a man discharg- 
ing worthily such duties, bearing such responsibilities, 
admitted to such companionship, underwent a marvellous 
transformation of character, became conformed in no 
small degree to the image of his divine Protector and 
Friend, and worthy to be called the Prince of God. 

But although it was no small part of the appointed 
work of the Patriarchal Dispensation to establish family 
religion as one of the corner-stones of the Church, it was 
not under this dispensation that it had its highest and 
most beneficent development. It had a nobler growth, 
became a mightier power, when the Jewish father, still 
ruling his household in the fear of the Lord, ministering 
daily and reverently at the family altar, could also teach 
his children, with line upon line and precept upon pre- 
cept, to read, reverence, and obey the teachings and com- 
mands of God's written Word. But it is only under the 
Christian Dispensation that this, like every other princi- 
ple of true religion, appears in its perfect form, accom- 
plishes its perfect work. Like Abraham, Isaac, and 
Jacob, the Christian father is the prince and the priest of 
his own family, and must bear the solemn responsibility 
of their spiritual well-being. Like them, he must rule 
his household in the fear of the Lord, Like them, he 
must minister at the family altar, interceding for his 
household with God, and bearing to the mercy-seat, upon 
his own soul, the burden of their sins, their sorrows, and 
needs. Like them, he must command his children and 
his household after him, that they keep the way of the 
Lord. Fulfilling wisely and faithfully the duties of this 
high and responsible office, with him also, as with faith- 
ful Abraham, shall God enter into an unfailing covenant, 
which shall bring blessings untold to his children of gen- 
erations yet unborn. 



14-6 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

Thus did the Patriarchal Dispensation fulfil its course 
and pass away. Its sphere was narrow, its work was 
limited and preparatory. There were but a few men, 
comparatively, who, like Abraham and Job, were taught 
and guided by personal communications from the Holy 
One. Existing only among the simple shepherds of 
Syria, Mesopotamia, and Bactria, the Patriarchal Church 
had no capability for enlargment and growth, could never 
rise above its first simple form. It was only in a settled 
and well-ordered community, among a numerous people, 
fixed in quiet and peaceful abodes, and enjoying the full 
light and intellectual cultivation of such civilization as 
then existed in the world, that the Church could be 
founded as a permanent and living organization, with its 
written revelation, its established institutions and observ- 
ances, its prophets and its priests. To raise up and pre- 
pare such a people was the next step in the unfolding 
plan of the divine providence and grace. The sons of 
Jacob were transferred to Egypt, and there settled upon 
a fruitful soil, under the light and influence of the splen- 
did civilization which had long had its seat in the valley 
of the Nile, that there they might become transformed 
into a civilized people, and grow up into a nation. 

In the course of three hundred years this great change 
was accomplished. Then, this new nation, the mass of 
its people having grown up in the habits and ideas of 
civilized life, its leading minds having been thoroughly 
trained in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, was wrenched, 
with pangs of sharpest agony, from its too comfortable 
abode in the midst of Egyptian heathenism, and led forth 
to Sinai, the Mount of God. Then these children of the 
covenant between God and Abraham his friend, were or- 
ganized into that living and perpetual Church, which, like 
the stone cut out of the mountain without hands, was tc 



THE PATRIARCHAL DISPENSATION. 1 4/ 

grow and expand, from age to age, until it filled the 
earth. Then, also, they received that divine revelation 
which was to prove the broad and firm foundation, not of 
their own peculiar civil and ecclesiastical polity alone, but 
of the knowledge of all moral and spiritual truth, to the 
end of time. 



CHAPTER XI. 

RIGHT AND WRONG. 

" It is never right to do wrong." This proposition 
was laid down, with much emphasis and confidence, as if 
it were the end of all controversy, by an excellent and 
thoughtful man now gone to his rest, when, in the regu- 
lar course of our International Sunday-School Lessons 
upon the Old Testament, certain very puzzling questions 
came up in regard to some things in the life and conduct 
of some of the Old Testament saints. Was it right for 
Abraham, or Jacob, or David, to have more than one 
wife ? Was it right for Abraham to own a great house- 
hold of slaves, " bought with money of the stranger"? 
Was it not just as great a sin in Abraham, as such decep- 
tion would be in us, when he prevaricated concerning his 
wife, saying : " She is my sister " ? Was it any thing 
less than cold-blooded murder, for which his own life 
ought to have paid the forfeit, when David went up from 
Gath, and invaded the Geshurites, and the Gezrites, and 
the Amalekites, and smote the land, and left neither man 
nor woman alive, for the simple reason that dead men 
tell no tales ? These, and many others like them, are 
questions which are all the time coming up to puzzle and 
perplex the student of the sacred Word, and which need 
much and careful study before we can give to them a 
true answer. 

The good man to whom I have referred certainly stood 
on impregnable ground when he laid down his proposi- 

148 



RIGHT AND WRONG. 149 

tion : It is never right to do wrong. We must accept 
this as a moral principle, fundamental and universal ; a 
principle which cannot be questioned ; to which there is, 
and can be, no exception. Whoever does that which he 
knows to be wrong, or that which, upon proper study 
and reflection, he might know to be wrong, is guilty of 
sin. Here, it would seem, we have a clear and constant 
rule, sufficient to guide us with safety and certainty in 
every step of the pathway of life. This one simple rule, 
we might suppose, would be enough to settle every 
moral question which arises before us, to determine the 
character of every act we are moved to perform, to point 
out the course we ought to pursue in every emergency 
of our lives. 

But that this is not the case is one of the most certain 
things in this uncertain world. When, in all honesty 
and good conscience, we have adopted this rule, have 
determined to abide by it in every act, and in every 
word, we soon find to our sore disappointment that our 
rule is not the safe and certain guide, in doubtful and 
perplexing circumstances, which we expected it to prove. 
Before a single day has passed we shall find ourselves, 
upon a multitude of important questions, just as much 
perplexed, just as much at sea, as we were before. And 
why? Not because we are not willing, if we can see 
how, to do the right and reject the wrong ; but simply 
because we cannot see. For we find that behind every 
question that comes before us for decision there rises 
another question. We have to ask: In this particular 
case, what is right and what is wrong ? And this ques- 
tion we often find it exceedingly difficult to answer. 
Upon such questions, as we see every day, good men, 
men of equal honesty and fairness, men equally wise and 
well instructed, and men who show the same thoughtful 



15° FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

and prayerful desire to learn what is right and what is 
wrong, come, and come with the same confidence and 
good conscience, to exactly opposite conclusions. 

A question of this kind arose in the Apostolic Church, 
and one which we shall find it very instructive to con- 
sider well. " One man esteemeth one day above another, 
another esteemeth every day alike " (Rom. xiv, 5). What 
were these days in regard to which there was such differ- 
ence of opinion and practice in the Apostolic Church ? 
They were the sacred days of the Jewish Law, especially 
and pre-eminently the Sabbath, the holy rest of the 
seventh day of the week, so emphatically enjoined in the 
Fourth Commandment. Were the Gentile Christians, 
and all Christians, bound to observe this Sabbath of the 
seventh day, or were they not ? Peter and Paul were 
both men who, in all good conscience, lived by our simple 
rule ; but here was a question of gravest importance, in 
answering which their rule gave them no help. Peter 
and the Jewish Christians were very clear and positive in 
their convictions. In their view, there was really no 
question at all. They took their stand on a positive 
command' of God. " Remember the seventh day to keep 
it holy. In it thou shalt not do any work." Here was 
a command which every Jew and every Christian was 
bound to obey. But, on the other hand, Paul, more 
deeply taught of the Holy Spirit, and, under his guid- 
ance and instruction, the whole Gentile Church held and 
practised the very opposite of this. In his higher and. 
broader view of the economy of divine grace, Paul saw 
clearly that this enforced rest of the seventh day, with 
all the Jewish ceremonial, was done away and ended in 
Christ. With the same confidence and firmness, there- 
fore, he held and taught that to the Christian the seventh 
day was not peculiarly holy, was as any other day. The 



RIGHT AND WRONG. I 51 

Christian's day of rest and worship was the first day of 
the week, the Lord's day, the day on which Christ rose 
from the dead. 

This question, further, did not stand alone. It was one 
of a large class of similar questions, arising out of the re- 
quirements of the Jewish Law, and the conscientious 
convictions of the Jewish Christians, which long troubled 
the early Church. In these cases we have very striking 
examples of those questions which are always coming up 
in the experience of the Church, of society, and of each 
individual life, to which our simple rule gives us no 
answer. They are questions in regard to which it is ex- 
ceedingly difficult to see what is right and what is wrong; 
and upon which there is and must be difference of opinion, 
and diversity of judgment, among the best and wisest 
men. 

And now, let us reason a little upon this matter. 

There is but one standard of right and wrong, and that 
standard is the will of God. Whatsoever God requires 
or permits me to do is right. Even though he requires 
me, as he did Abraham, to take the life of my own child, 
because he requires it, it is right. And so, on the other 
hand, whatsoever God forbids me to do, even though it 
be that which, in general, his own law requires, because 
he forbids it, is wrong. And yet further, nothing is 
wrong for me unless God has forbidden it to me by some 
clear expression of his will, either directly or by implica- 
tion, in his natural laws or his revealed Word. Whatso- 
ever is not so forbidden me, it is right for me to do. 
And yet further, no law or prohibition is binding upon 
me which I do not and cannot know and understand. 
Even though a thing be contrary to the will and law of 
God, if I do not and cannot know of the prohibition, it is 
not wrong to me. For " Where no law is, there is no 



I $2 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

transgression." For this reason much, that would be 
wrong for us, was not wrong for men in the early ages of 
human history, is not now wrong for men in heathen 
lands. 

The difficulty in the way of knowing always what is right 
and what is wrong lies in this : that while right and wrong, 
in their essential principles, are forever and unchangeably 
the same, in their specific application to particular acts 
and practices, they are constantly changing. That which 
it is right for me to do to-day, it may be wrong for me to 
do to-morrow ; and that which it is wrong for me to do 
to-day, I may do to-morrow without blame. To-day it 
is right for me to shoot quails and woodcock ; to-morrow 
it will be forbidden by the law, and therefore wrong. To- 
day it may be right for me to buy a car-load of goods in 
Canada, and bring them, without toll or custom, to my 
home in Massachusetts ; to-morrow a new revenue law 
will have gone into operation, and this unrestricted trade 
with men of other lands will be smuggling, and therefore 
wrong. 

This is true in respect to the changing laws of human 
governments, and this is not strange. But it is just as true 
of some of the most positive commands of God. In many 
points the law of God itself has changed, with changing 
circumstances, as completely and radically as the laws of 
men. The Jew was imperatively required to keep holy 
the Sabbath of the seventh day. To the Christian there 
was no such law. On one memorable Sabbath, the Sab- 
bath on which the Lord of glory lay sleeping in death, if 
the Jew had broken the rest of the holy day by any 
labor, he would have been guilty of a great sin. One 
day later Christ had risen from the dead, and that law 
had been forever abrogated. Thenceforth the seventh day 
was as any other day ; and on that day Jew or Christian 



RIGHT AND WRONG. I 53 

might go forth to the labors of the field or the workshop 
without blame. To Abraham, to Jacob, and to David, 
it was right to take in marriage more than one wife, be- 
cause to them God had not forbidden it. To me, and to 
all Christian men, God has forbidden polygamy, and 
therefore it is wrong. To Joshua, Gideon, Saul, and 
David, it was right to pursue, and utterly to destroy, the 
enemies of their country and their faith ; because God 
not only permitted but commanded them so to do. To 
Christian men such warfare is wrong, because to them 
God has forbidden it. 

Considering thoughtfully these examples from the 
Scriptures, there are three points which we may clearly 
see. 

I. — An act may be right at one time, and ivrong at another 
time, through a change in the law of right, which is the law 
of God. 

As we may see from the examples just cited, there are 
a thousand acts and practices in regard to which the law 
of right is not one and unchangeable, but always changing 
with the progress of light and knowledge. Of this truth 
the history of the world is one long and universal illus- 
tration. In all the social and civil life of men, there is 
hardly any thing the moral character of which, and the 
law respecting which, have not greatly changed with the 
change in times and circumstances. There are many 
things which, though once lawful and right, are now fla- 
grantly wrong. There were long ages of the worlds' history 
when the buying and holding of slaves was no sin, was no 
evil or wrong ; when, in the midst of the violence and 
bloodshed which filled the earth, it was a happy thing for 
the wretched captive that he could be sold into a mild and 
gentle servitude, as the servitude of the Eastern world 
most usually was, and so saved from a bloody death. But, 



154 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

with the progress of society, the law of right in this matter 
has wholly changed. Now, to the Christian man, there 
are few greater sins than this making merchandise of the 
bodies and souls of men. In the same way, the law of 
right has changed in regard to the authority of kings in 
the State, and of bishops in the Church. To take an- 
other illustration nearer home, so it has also been in re- 
spect to the sale and use of alcoholic drinks. But 
passing by all these illustrations of the point before us, 
we have, in the one memorable case already referred to 
in the Apostolic Church, the full and conclusive proof 
that an act wrong at one time may be lawful and right 
at another time by a change in the law respecting it — 
the law of right, and the law of God. 

II. — In the experience of any man, or of any community 
of men, that which is ordi?iarily wrong may become lawful 
and right, or, that which is ordinarily lawful and right may 
become wrong, by a change, not in the law, but in their own 
circumstances. 

Ordinarily, it is wrong, and a great sin, for me, by my 
own deliberate act, and upon my own sole authority, to 
take the life of my fellow-man. But if, in defence of my 
own life, or the lives of my family, I take the life of a 
midnight burglar and murderer, I am held guiltless before 
God and man. Ordinarily, all mob violence, the taking 
of the law into their own hands by individual men, or 
companies of men, for the doing of justice and the punish- 
ment of crime, we hold to be most clearly wrong. Yet 
cases sometimes occur in which the people of some op- 
pressed community, without the sanction of law, and in 
defiance of the regularly constituted authorities, are com- 
pelled to rise in defence of their most sacred rights. The 
famous Vigilance Committee of San Francisco, thirty 
years ago, was a mob, which, with no authority of law. 



RIGHT AND WRONG. 155 

banished a multitude of evil-doers, and overturned the 
government of the State. Yet that most remarkable, 
most regular, and, in a higher sense, most lawful of mobs, 
was the salvation of California, and all men now hold it 
acquitted of blame or wrong. Ordinarily, we hold it 
wrong to labor on the Christian Sabbath. But if flood, 
or tempest, or fire were endangering the property of our- 
selves or our neighbors, we could work from morning 
until night, with all good conscience, upon the holy day. 
There is no need to multiply these illustrations. In sud- 
den and pressing emergencies, we all of us believe, and 
we all act upon the belief, that many things, ordinarily 
wrong, are made by our peculiar circumstances lawful 
and right. That is to say, we all of us believe that the 
right and the wrong of many things which we are called 
upon to do, depend not wholly upon the law, but in part 
upon the circumstances in which we are placed. In all 
such emergencies, the question arises — under these cir- 
cumstances, what is right and what is wrong? And this 
question, however sincerely and honestly asked, we often 
find it very difficult to answer. We are in a position 
where our simple rule affords us no help. 

III. — The same thing, at the same time, and under the 
same circumstances, may be wholly right to one man, and 
wholly wrong to another man, just according to his own 
views of truth and duty, his own conscientious convictions. 

This is, perhaps, the most important of our three 
points, the one which we need most clearly to understand, 
most carefully to fix in our minds. The law of the Jew- 
ish Sabbath had been done away, the Christian was under 
no obligation to observe it, to him the seventh day was 
as any other day. But many of the Jewish Christians 
did not understand this change in the law of God. They 
believed the letter of the Fourth Commandment to be of 



I 56 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

perpetual obligation, and that they were just as much 
bound to keep the Sabbath of the seventh day as they had 
been before the resurrection of Christ. The binding force 
of these conscientious convictions the Apostle distinctly 
recognizes : " Let every man be fully persuaded in his 
own mind. He that regardeth the day regardeth it to 
the Lord ; and he that regardeth not the day, to the Lord 
he doth not regard it." If the Jewish Christian believed 
himself bound to keep the Sabbath of the seventh day, 
he was bound to keep it. To go forth to his ordinary 
labors upon that day would be just as much wrong for 
him as if the law had not been changed. He was bound 
by his own conscientious convictions. 

Just the same principle the Apostle applies in 1 Cor. 
viii, to the eating of meats offered in sacrifice to idols. 
The idol was nothing in the world. The meat was neither 
the better nor the worse for its false consecration, and he 
who had no conscience against it, might eat it freely and 
with thanksgiving. But if he had scruples against it ; if 
he felt that by eating this meat he was joining in the 
sacrifice, worshipping the idol, and so polluting his soul, 
then his eating would be sin. Or, if his lawful eating 
would be an occasion of offence to a weaker brother, for 
this he must abstain, for this reason his eating would be 
sin. 

Upon all such questions, says the Apostle : " Let 
every one be fully persuaded in his own mind." In these 
words, and in all his teachings upon this subject, he takes 
his stand upon a great principle, a principle of universal 
application, which is this — in all doubtful questions of 
right and wrong, every man's own conscience must be his 
own ultimate standard and guide. On every doubtful 
question, every man is bound to acquaint himself care- 
fully with the teachings of the Word of God. He is 



RIGHT AND WRONG. 1 5 7 

bound to use his own reason, honestly and diligently, in 
a full and careful examination of the question he is to 
decide. Most of all, he is bound to pray for the guid- 
ance of the Holy Spirit, that divine Teacher whose ex- 
press office it is to guide men into the knowledge of the 
truth. When he has done all this ; when he has thus 
faithfully used all the means within his reach for arriving 
at a true decision, then his own conscience must be his 
final judge. That which his own conscience, thus guided 
and enlightened, distinctly forbids, to him will be wrong 
and sin ; even though to another man, with other light, 
and different views, the same thing may be lawful and 
right. Martin Luther, in all good conscience, and, as we 
believe, without blame, broke his monastic vow, and took 
to himself a wife. But there was many another monk of 
his time who could not see this question as he saw it, 
whose conscience was bound by his perpetual vow, and 
to whom, for this reason, marriage was forbidden as a 



grievous sin. 



On the other hand, that which my own conscience, 
thus guided and instructed, pronounces lawful and right, 
is right for me ; even though to other men, with other 
light, and other views of truth and duty, it might be 
wholly wrong. I come to the table of the Lord with a 
clear conscience, although baptised only by sprinkling, 
and in my early infancy. But there is many a Baptist 
brother who could not do this without sin ; because, with 
his views of truth and duty, he has no right at the table 
of the Lord, until by full immersion he has made profes- 
sion of his faith ; and by his convictions on this subject 
he is solemnly bound. To every man, at all times, and 
under all circumstances, to deliberately violate his own 
conscience, is sin. 

And now, from the consideration of these three points, 



158 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

let us advance to another truth, a truth of immeasurable 
importance to us and to all. These really and truly- 
doubtful questions as to what is right and what is wrong, 
which, from the day of Peter's mission to Cornelius, have 
filled the Christian Church with controversy and confu- 
sion ; which in every age have agitated, as they still agi- 
tate, human society ; which have perplexed every indi- 
vidual man since men began to live and act as free and 
intelligent moral beings ; these really and truly doubtful 
questions of right and wrong, what are they ? They are, 
to those who have the Bible in their hands, always sec- 
ondary and non-essential in their character. They never 
touch the firm and sure foundations of virtue and practi- 
cal righteousness. God has not dealt so hardly with us 
as to leave the grand, essential questions of our moral 
life and eternal destiny in uncertainty and doubt. All 
these questions he has settled for us upon his own divine 
authority. Upon these vital points, to all men who rev- 
erently receive, and loyally obey the revelation of his 
holy Word, there is no question, there is no uncertainty. 
Always the doubtful question of right and wrong is one 
comparatively unessential to the great foundation prin- 
ciples of virtue and religion. 

The early Church was troubled by many doubtful 
questions, questions of great importance, on which the 
apostles themselves held different opinions, and held 
them with strong conviction. But what were these 
questions? Whether the Gentile, believer might be re- 
ceived without circumcision into the Christian Church. 
Whether, in addition to the Lord's day, the day of Chris- 
tian rest and worship, the converted Jew was also bound 
to keep the Jewish Sabbath of the seventh day. Whether 
the Christian might innocently partake of meats which 
had been offered in sacrifice to idols. These, and such 



RIGHT AND WRONG. 1 5 9 

as these, were the only really doubtful questions which 
disturbed the early Church ; and not one of these ques- 
tions so much as touched the grand essentials of virtue 
and religion. Upon these vital points there was no con- 
troversy ; they were all settled by divine authority. So 
it has always been. In earlier and ruder times, while as 
yet the inherent rights of man were not clearly under- 
stood, it was long a doubtful question whether a good 
man might not, like Abraham, have in his household ser- 
vants bought with money of the stranger. But there 
has never been any doubt that the Christian master was 
bound to regard and treat his Christian servant in all 
love and kindness, as a brother in Christ. At the present 
time there are many most vital questions which are held 
in sharpest controversy in the Christian world ; but the 
doubt and questioning upon these points are in the 
minds of those who do not fully receive, and reverently 
follow, the teachings, of God's holy Book. In no truly 
Christian mind is there doubt or uncertainty upon one 
of these points. They are settled, by divine authority, 
beyond all controversy. 

With us, as with the early Christians, the really doubt- 
ful questions of right and wrong are all of a minor and 
unessential character. Among true and faithful Chris- 
tian men there are many questions as to various state- 
ments of theological doctrine ; but there is no question 
or disagreement as to the grand essentials of revealed 
truth, or of practical righteousness in the sight of 
God. There are questions as to Sabbath services, 
but none as to the sacredness of the Sabbath itself. 
There are questions as to the rights and privileges of 
women ; but among those who loyally accept the teach- 
ings of our Lord Jesus Christ, there is no question as to 
the sacred and perpetual obligation of the marriage vow. 



i6o 



FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 



There are iniquitous laws in many of our States, which 
allow of a false divorce, a wicked severance of the mar- 
riage bond. But these laws, and all conduct or action 
whatsoever, on the part of any person or party, which in 
any wise infringes the sanctity of the marriage relation, 
or invades the sacred rights of husband, or wife, all 
truly Christian men are agreed in pronouncing, with con- 
stant and unanimous voice, both shameful and wrong. 

So stands the case with us in all our moral action 
under the law of right, the law of God. Upon every 
vital and essential point, that law is explicit and clear. 
Upon all such points, every question which can arise 
before us is settled for us by a divine authority, beyond 
controversy or appeal. But, upon minor and non-essen- 
tial matters, questions full of doubt and uncertainty do 
arise, will be always rising, to perplex our minds. Upon 
all such questions we can only follow the sound and 
excellent rule laid down by the Apostle. With honest, 
careful, prayerful study of the question before him, " let 
every man be fully persuaded in his own mind." And 
while, like the early Christians, we honestly form, and 
steadfastly maintain our own views of truth, and duty, 
and right upon all such questions, let us do so in the 
frank and cheerful recognition of the perfect right of all 
other men to do the same. Remembering that the 
questions in controversy are doubtful in their character, 
that good and honest men may differ in their judgment 
respecting them, let us learn to hold our own convictions 
in all magnanimity and fairness, in all charity and Chris- 
tian love. 



CHAPTER XII. 

NEVERTHELESS. 

The law of right, which is the law of God, in its appli- 
cation to specific acts and practices, is not always the 
same. It varies greatly with the changing circumstance 
of human life. Many things which were lawful and right 
to the Old Testament saints would be sin in us ; many 
things forbidden to them we may do without blame. The 
moral responsibility of all men is measured by their light, 
their knowledge of the law. To men too ignorant, too 
unintelligent to have any idea of a law of right, there 
could be no such thing as sin. To men with but a vague 
and imperfect knowledge of the law, the guilt even of 
what seem to us great offences may be very small. A 
great part of that which is sin to us was, for these rea- 
sons, either not sin at all, or was sin only in a very small 
degree, to the early generations of men, as it still is to 
men in heathen lands. 

This is true. But the whole tenor of the Scriptures, 
and, in particular, the sad story of the sin and repentance 
of David, recorded in the nth and 12th chapters of the 
Second Book of Samuel, teach us very clearly that two 
other things are also true. 

The first is that to all men, at all times, and under all 
circumstances, actual sin, the deliberate violation of the 
known will and law of God, is, in its character and its 
consequences, forever the same. 

The second is that although sin may be forgiven, and 

161 



l62 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

ali the stain of its guilt washed away, forgiveness does 
not cut short, does not destroy or prevent the fruits and 
consequences of sin ; that although his sin has been for- 
given, whatsoever a man has sown, that he must also 
reap. 

" Howbeit," said the prophet to the guilty king, " be- 
cause by this deed thou hast given great occasion to 
the enemies of the Lord to blaspheme, the child also 
that is born unto thee shall surely die." Howbeit, as 
here used, means nevertheless ; and this word neverthe- 
less, in this connection, is well worthy of our thoughtful 
consideration. The Lord hath put away thy sin, thou 
shalt not die, nevertheless — . To David, this word came 
clothed with a terrible fulness of meaning, which he 
felt in many a dark and bitter hour to the end of his life. 
Thy prayer is heard, thy repentance is accepted, thy sin 
is forgiven, thy soul is restored, nevertheless that which 
thou hast sown thou shalt surely reap ; the self-wrought 
punishment of thy sin, to the last jot and tittle, thou shalt 
surely endure. 

Many seem to suppose that the Bible assures to the 
child of God full escape from all the consequences of his 
sin, as well as from the guilt of his sin, on the easy terms 
of repentance and prayer for pardon. It is a great 
mistake. We may look through the whole Bible, from 
beginning to end, and we shall not find the case of any 
other man, whether good or bad, who was punished for 
his sin as David was punished, the man of whom it is 
written : " I have found David, the son of Jesse, a man 
after mine own heart," — as David was punished after his 
sin was forgiven. In this regard compare David with 
Ahab. With the later Old Testament writers, the name 
of Ahab is a very synonym for the most atrocious 
wickedness. " There was none like unto Ahab, which 



JVE VER THE LESS. 1 63 

did sell himself to work wickedness in the sight of the 
Lord." But Ahab was a godless man, to whom God 
had never revealed himself, of whom little was expected, 
and whose wickedness was, comparatively, of small ac- 
count. And when, terrified by the thunders of Elijah, 
he humbled himself, and went softly before the Lord, 
the Lord turned from his anger, and, so far as appears 
from the sacred record, no punishment at all was visited 
upon him for his sin. 

With David it was not so. David was the man whom 
God had specially chosen to be his servant and friend ; to 
whom God had revealed himself in all the fulness of his 
goodness and his truth. The sin of such a man was of a 
deeper dye, its consequences were not so easily escaped. 
To him the word of the Lord was : " Thou art the man ; 
and because thou hast done this thing, because thou hast 
killed Uriah the Hittite with the sword of the children 
of Ammon, and hast taken his wife to be thy wife, there- 
fore the sword shall never depart from thy house. I will 
raise up evil against thee out of thine own house, and 
will take thy wives and give them to thy neighbor. 
For thou didst it secretly ; but I will do this thing before 
all Israel, and before the sun. And because by this deed 
thou hast given great occasion to the enemies of the 
Lord to blaspheme, the child also that is born unto thee 
shall surely die." Thus to repentant David, coupled 
with the assurance of forgiving grace and the restoration 
of the divine favor, came this dark, foreboding — Neverthe- 
less. And the truth which we may clearly see in the light 
of this example, is that to every one of us, though our 
sins may have been forgiven, may have been wholly 
washed away in a Saviour's atoning blood, there comes 
by the word of the Lord the same — Nevertheless. Thy 
repentance is accepted, *thy prayer is heard, thy sin is 




164 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

forgiven, thy soul is saved ; nevertheless, that which 
thou hast sown thou must surely reap ; the fruits of thy 
sin thou must gather into thine own bosom. 

If, until the feebleness of age is already upon me, I have 
misspent my life, have wasted my powers of body and mind 
in riotous living and sinful pleasure, repentance and forgive- 
ness can never recover what I have lost, can never bring 
back my wasted life. I must come to heaven, if I come 
there at all, a shrivelled and blighted soul. If, like 
David, I have done some evil and shameful deed, some 
act of wickedness which has blackened my soul, and 
brought upon me the condemning judgment of God and 
men, like David I may repent and be forgiven, but to 
me as to him, repentance and forgiveness can never undo 
the wickedness I have done, can never stop it in its ac- 
cursed fruitfulness of evil, can never remove its hateful 
memory from my mind, can never quench the fires of 
shame and bitter regret in my soul. To this day that 
sin of David remains an example terribly fruitful of evil. 
To this day it gives to the enemies of the Lord great 
occasion to blaspheme ; is one of the greatest hindrances 
which every servant of Christ encounters in doing his 
Master's work. And if, in that dim unknown between 
death and the judgment, David still lives in a conscious, 
intelligent state, watching all that transpires on the earth, 
tracing on, generation after generation, century after 
century, this eternal fruitage of his own old sin, to this 
day he must still hear, as he heard in the flesh, those 
awful words of the prophet : " Thou art the man." And 
as it was with David's sin, so it must be with the sin of 
every man. 

" Whereto " then, we may cry, with Hamlet's uncle in 
the agony of his remorse, " Whereto serves mercy? ' Is 
there no escape from the power of sin and the curse of a 



NE VER THELESS. 1 65 

broken law? Has Christ died in vain? Is there no 
cleansing and restoring power in his atoning blood? 
Yes, there is salvation from sin, full, free, and everlast- 
ing, in true repentance and faith in the Lord Jesus 
Christ. Christ is able to save, even unto the uttermost, 
all that come unto God through him. Though we be 
adulterers, drunkards, extortioners, and thieves, the guilt 
and stain of our sin may be wholly washed away in his 
atoning blood, so that we may stand spotless and unre- 
provable before our God and Judge. For, " Such," says 
Paul to the Corinthian disciples : " Such were some of 
you. But ye are washed ; but ye are sanctified ; but ye 
are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the 
Spirit of our God." These words assure us that the vilest 
sinner that walks the earth, by the redeeming power of re- 
pentance and forgiving grace, may be washed, justified, 
and sanctified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the 
Spirit of our God. 

Let us turn, then, to consider somewhat more carefully 
just what this salvation of the Gospel really effects for the 
repentant soul. Though I have sinned never so deeply 
and desperately, if I have repented of my sin, and turned 
in simple, loving trust to Christ, the Lamb of God, who 
taketh away the sin of the world, by my repentance and 
faith three things have been accomplished for me. 

1. I am reconciled to God. 

Christ is the propitiation for my sins. He is my Advo- 
cate with the Father ; and looking well pleased upon his 
face, for his sake my God and Judge says to me : " Son, 
thy sins be forgiven thee, go in peace." And so — 

" My God is reconciled, 
His pardoning voice I hear, 
He owns me for a child, 
I can no longer fear ; 



1 66 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

With confidence I now draw nigh, 
And 'Father, Abba, Father,' cry." 

I am reconciled to God. The law hath no more domin- 
ion over me. "There is, therefore, now no condemnation 
to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk, not after 
the flesh, but after the Spirit." 

2. I have recovered the lost integrity of my soul. 

I have sinned, deeply and without excuse ; but I have 
repented of my sin. I have rejected it, hated it, and 
thrust it from me. I have turned to Christ in a loving, 
trusting faith, and in his blood I am thoroughly washed 
from its guilt and its stain. I know not how he can do 
this great thing for me, but he has promised to do it, and 
I believe his word. He is the Lamb of God which taketh 
away the sin of the world. The blood of Jesus Christ his 
son cleanseth from all sin. 

" His blood can make the foulest clean; 
His blood availed for me," 

And so, by repentance of my sin, and faith in my Sav- 
iour's cleansing blood, I once more stand erect, pure and 
clean from every stain of guilt, in the recovered integrity 
of my soul. 

3. I am made holy, and fit for a holy heaven. 

Not only have I purged myself, by repentance and 
faith in Christ, of every stain and taint of sin, but, by the 
renewing power of the Holy Ghost, I am born again into 
a new and holy life. The Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, 
has entered into my soul and abides upon me. By his 
blessed, transforming power I am brought into sym~ 
pathy and union with the divine. Christ is formed in 
me. Steadily, and ever more and more completely, 
I am growing up into him who is my head, into fitness 



NE VER THELESS. 1 6? 

for the life and companionship of a holy heaven. Striv- 
ing day by day, and with all my powers, to live in full 
conformity to the law of right and the law of love, I 
dwell in God, and God in me. And so, with all the glori- 
ous company of the redeemed I shall come to Zion at 
last with songs and everlasting joy. 

Poor, unworthy sinners as we are, through riches of 
free grace in Jesus Christ, ours shall be all the glory and 
all the blessedness of heaven forever and ever. We are 
washed, we are sanctified, we are justified in the name of 
the Lord Jesus, and by the spirit of our God. To us are 
given exceeding great and precious promises, by which 
we are made partakers of the divine nature. Now are we 
the sons of God ; and if sons of God then heirs of God ; 
heirs to all that our God and Father has to give, in this 
world and in all worlds for ever more. 

All this is true, and yet, nevertheless, saved, redeemed, 
transformed, glorified though we may be, the old evil of 
our sinful lives has not been, cannot be, undone ; has not 
been, cannot be, forgotten. Suppose that like those men, 
high in business positions, whose crimes and punishment 
have been, during these last few months, so painfully 
prominent before the public mind, I have been guilty of 
a long course of swindling and fraud which has at last 
brought me to the State prison. By and by, when I have 
endured my punishment and been released from prison, 
I may be truly penitent for my sin, as penitent as David 
was when he wrote the 51st Psalm, and as freely and 
fully forgiven. But this will not undo the evil of my old 
crimes, will cover them with no veil of forgetfulness. The 
men whom my dishonesty ruined will still be living in 
poverty and distress ; the widow and the fatherless whom 
I defrauded of their living will still be pining in want. 



1 68 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

From the deep and terrible injuries inflicted by my 
hypocrisy and wrong-doing, society and the Church will 
not have recovered. All this I shall know and feel, 
in every moment of my waking life, with pangs un- 
speakable of vain regret. The sight of my face or 
even of my name, will bring up in every mind the 
full remembrance of what I have done. I shall never 
look any man in the face without the soul-depressing 
fear that he is thinking of those old crimes and their 
terrible fruitage of evil. And so, like Cain, I must bear 
upon my forehead the brand of my felon's doom. And 
not upon my forehead alone ; I must carry it with me to 
my grave, deeply burned into my inmost soul. I have 
repented, I have been forgiven, I am reconciled to God, 
and hope for heaven ; yet, nevertheless, the wages of my 
sin will be surely paid. 

Suppose, again, that I have been living for many years 
a vile, licentious life, debasing my soul with all the filth 
of lawless sensual indulgence, a corrupter of youth, a per- 
petual fountain of evil to society around me, but that 
even from this slough of pollution I have been redeemed 
by the power of almighty grace. I have repented of my 
sin, I have been forgiven, I am reconciled to God. But 
what has become of all that old, that horrible evil of my 
former life of shame and sin? Is it undone? Is it for- 
gotten ? Are its loathsome traces wholly obliterated 
from my soul? Oh! no, no. Would God it might be 
so ! but so it is not, cannot be. The traces and conse- 
quences of my old life of sin have not been obliterated 
from my being by the cleansing, restoring pov/er of the 
blood of Christ. Take some article of apparel, some rich 
and splendid garment, and throw it to your swine, to be 
trampled under their feet in the filth of that horrible 
slough in which they love to wallow. You can recover 



NE VER THELE SS. 1 69 

that garment, you can wash it in pure water until it is 
wholly clean. But restore it as it was before, you cannot. 
All its delicacy, all its pristine beauty, are gone, to be 
brought back no more. So it is, and must be, with a 
soul recovered by a Saviour's redeeming grace from the 
filth of a vicious, licentious life. It is washed and made 
clean ; but the deadly work, wrought through all its being 
by the old life of evil, cannot be undone. It is like a 
soiled, bedraggled garment, from which the freshness and 
delicacy of its native innocence are gone to return no 
more. If I have so sinned and been so restored, from the 
horrible memories of that old evil I can never escape. 
They have become a part of my existence itself. That 
old wickedness was a deadly disease, gnawing like putrid 
ulcers into my very being. It wasted my energies, 
sapped my powers of body and of mind, and marred 
with hideous deformity the whole countenance of my 
soul. From the filth of that evil life I have been washed 
and made clean. Its deadly disease has been healed. 
But I am like a brand half consumed plucked out of the 
fire, weakened and broken, scarred, seamed, and muti- 
lated by the evil from which I have escaped. So, by the 
very nature of moral evil, it must be with all sin. It may 
be repented of, it may be forgiven, its guilt and stain 
may be wholly washed away; yet, nevertheless, its work 
must still remain, the harvests it has sown must still be 
reaped, its wages must still be paid until the darkness of 
the grave closes over the scene. 

A nd how is it with the life beyojid ? 

This, after all, is the great question, a question which 
must rest with oppressive weight upon our minds. Does 
the power of this dark, foreboding nevertheless end with 
the grave ? Or, does it perchance overleap these bounds 
of time, and reach on, and on, into, it may be through, . 



lyO FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

eternity itself; carrying its shame and sorrow, its sharp 
regrets, nay, it may be its bitter remorse, into the very 
immortality of the redeemed, amidst the very glories of 
heaven? These are questions which we cannot answer; 
but, as we ponder them long and deeply, troubled 
thoughts will fill our breasts. This at least is clear. 
This life is a probation. We are here to prepare for 
heaven ; and our heaven, if for us there is any heaven, 
will be just that for which we prepare. But if this is so, 
what a heaven many of us, who call ourselves Christians, 
must be preparing for ourselves. 

Let me, in regard to the future life, as I already have 
in regard to the present life, bring this question home to 
myself; and let me do this, putting myself for each and 
every man who is conscious of sin in the sight of God. 
Suppose, then, that as the returning prodigal came home 
to his father's house, so I come to heaven at last, after 
having spent and wasted my substance, my energies, and 
my life in the riotous pleasures of sin and lust, the mere 
wreck of my early self. Here I am, after my perilous 
voyage over the stormy sea of life, safely harbored at last 
in the blessed heaven. But what a poor, blighted, shriv- 
elled soul, to take my place among the glorious sons of 
God ! They have been trained and well prepared for that 
higher life. All their powers have been unfolded. They 
have put on Christ, have grown up into his likeness, un- 
til they stand in equal companionship with the angels of 
the elder heaven. And as I measure myself, so weak, 
so unformed, so worthless, with their strength and glory; 
as I compare myself with what I might have been, with 
what God made me to be, and what I ought to have be- 
come, what else than deepest humiliation can take pos- 
session of my soul ? To what else can I look forward, 
through all the eternity before me, than sharpest pangs 



NE VER THELE SS. 1 7 1 

of vain regret that I should so have wasted my heavenly 
inheritance by the follies of my mortal life ? 

Or, suppose again that I am saved at last, after long 
years of Christian profession, but of cold, half-hearted, 
unfaithful profession, my spiritual nature weak and un- 
developed, my work everywhere neglected and unper- 
formed, my soul poor and bankrupt in treasures laid up 
in heaven. What glory, or what joy can there be for me 
in a heavenly life so begun ? As I look within, what can 
I see but a spiritual nature, feeble and dwarfed by an un- 
faithful, worldly life? As I look around me, why must I 
not see on every side that which will fill me with grief 
and shame ? It may not be so, but it seems to me that 
coming thus to heaven, I shall look with dismay upon a 
life high and glorious, with which I have little sympathy, 
for which I have no adequate fitness or preparation ; 
that I shall see on every hand distressing fruits and evi- 
dences of neglected opportunities, of work unperformed ; 
that, saddest of all, I shall see many a mournful, vacant 
place; places forever vacant, of those whose souls were 
entrusted to my keeping, whom I should have taken by 
the 'hand and led tenderly to heaven, but who are not 
there. And so, on all things within me and around me, 
why must I not read forever, as in burning words : 
Unfaithful servant, unfaithful servant, unfaitJiful servant, 
there is no glory, there is no reward here for thee ! 

And now, to set the matter in still stronger light, let 
me suppose that my life has been, not simply unfaithful, 
or even inwardly and secretly corrupt, but actively and 
powerfully evil. Suppose that, through all the years of 
my active life, I have been a rumseller ; pursuing my in- 
fernal craft, as so many are pursuing it to-day, with 
shrewdness, skill, and terrible success. For all these years 
I have been plying the tempter's arts, laying my corrupt- 



I7 2 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

ing, destroying hand upon fathers, brothers, sons ; upon 
men in mature life, and unwary youth ; kindling in their 
veins the fires which could not be quenched, seducing 
them from the paths of virtue and peace, and dragging 
them steadily downward to poverty, vice, and shame. 
And not these individuals alone, but their families with 
them, and their children after them, until society around 
me is filled with corruption and evil ; until the ever-swell- 
ing crowd of my victims, in long and woful procession, 
are passing on from their life of vice, misery, and shame, 
to the awful retributions of the eternal future. All this 
/ have done. But at last my eyes have been opened ; I 
have been enabled to turn from my evil ways in true re- 
pentance, and through a Saviour's atoning blood, to find 
forgiving and cleansing grace. And then, like the con- 
verted Saul of Tarsus, I have set myself, with all the 
energies of my ransomed being, to redeem the time, to 
serve my God and generation, until, like the great Apos- 
tle, in spite of my earlier crimes, I rise at last to eminent 
holiness and fitness for a holy heaven. 

But where are they, that vast and woful multitude, 
whom, in my old days of sin and evil, / led astray, 7 se- 
duced and ruined, /dragged down to shame and death? 
While I am here, amid all the glories and joys of 
heaven, they are in outer darkness, where their worm 
dieth not, and their fire is not quenched, doomed to an 
eternity of shame and woe. Oh, bitter and terrible 
thought ! Oh, vision of horror and gloom ! Can I ever 
rid that thought from my soul ? Can I ever get that 
vision away from before my eyes ? Will the time ever 
come through all the eternity before me, when, as the 
picture of their wretched doom rises before my mind, I 
shall not be compelled to cry, in agonies of vain regret: 
All this is my work ; /led these souls astray ; /dragged 



NE VER THELESS. 1 7 3 

them down to sin, and shame, and death ; / sent them to 
outer darkness, and everlasting woe, and well do I de- 
serve to share their doom ? 

Are these things so ? Does this inexorable neverthe- 
less, from which there is no escape this side the grave, 
throw onward its dark foreshadowings over the whole 
eternity even of the redeemed in heaven ? These are 
painful questions which, it may be, we cannot answer 
here. But whatever questions there may be in regard to 
this subject which we cannot answer, upon this point at 
least there is no uncertainty, no doubt. Sin is not, as so 
many persons, especially so many young persons, and, 
alas that it should be so ! so many who call themselves 
Christians seem to imagine, a light and trifling thing, to 
be indulged in with little anxiety or compunction, to be 
easily and wholly escaped from on the simple terms of re- 
pentance and prayer for pardon ; to be at will, like a 
worn-out garment, thrown off and altogether forgotten. 
Oh, no ! It is not so. Sin is an evil and a bitter thing; 
that abominable thing that God hateth. Sin is a suicide 
of the soul. Every deliberate act of sin is a stab at our 
own vitals, inflicting wounds which may be healed, but 
of which the scars and mutilations can never be effaced. 
Sin is a deadly disease, gnawing like a consuming cancer 
into the very substance of our moral being. Sin is the 
work of a wicked life ; an evil and enduring work. He 
that worketh receiveth wages ; and the wages of sin is 
death. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

INSPIRATION : THE HEBREW LANGUAGE : THE EARLIER 

HEBREW SCRIPTURES. 

The Bible is like the body of a living man. The man, 
of mature years and perfect health, stands before us a 
living organism, instinct with life in every part. The 
life is there, in every limb, organ, and function, a mighty 
presence, manifest, ever acting, the source of all that 
makes the man differ from a lump of lifeless clay. But 
when we attempt to detect and examine this life, as 
something apart from the body ; when we try to look at 
it and understand it as it is in itself, we find ourselves at 
once baffled and wholly at a loss. No human skill has 
ever yet been able to penetrate its mystery, to find its 
vital seat or source, or to understand its nature, the se- 
cret of its spontaneous power. 

Yet this is a search which we cannot give up, which 
with every failure we find ourselves impelled to renew. 
We say : Let us take some limb or member of this living 
frame, and carefully examine it to see if we cannot dis- 
cover the secret and the nature of this mysterious life. 
So we sever a foot from the body, and proceed to dissect 
and study it with minutest care. Our quest is wholly 
vain. We find abundantly the results and products of 
life, but the life we cannot find. The life has fled ; and 
the dissevered foot lies before us a mere lump of dead, 
decaying matter. 

Then we say : We will take some nobler organ, one 

i74 



INS P IRA TION, THE HEBRE W LA NG UA GE, ETC. 1 7 5 

more important in its character and offices, and one 
which seems to be nearer to the hidden seat of life. We 
will take the right arm ; and if we examine that with 
care, perhaps we shall find the life. But again our search 
is vain. From the amputated arm the life is gone ; it has 
no more to reveal than the foot. 

Not yet discouraged, we will make another trial. If 
in this wonderful material organ of the living spirit there 
is any seat of the life, surely the heart must be that seat. 
If we take the heart from the body and study it wisely, 
we may hope in that to find the secret of the life. But 
again our disappointment is complete. As an organ of 
the living body, the heart is indeed the seat of life. But 
the heart dissevered from the body has nothing to re- 
veal. It is just as dead, as totally without value for our 
present purpose, as the amputated arm or foot. 

There is but one thing more that we can do, and that 
is to examine the brain. The brain is the organ of the 
intellect. It is the instrument and the measure of all the 
mental power of the man. If we dissect and examine 
this with care, we may be able to penetrate the mystery 
of life. But still our search is wholly vain. From the 
brain, too, every trace of life is gone. It is but dead, 
decaying matter which has been a subtle instrument of 
life and thought, but now it has nothing to reveal. Thus 
impossible is it to discover the seat, to penetrate the 
mystery, to detect the secret, to explain or understand 
the nature, of that life, which in every part and organ fills 
and energizes the body of the living man. 

Just so we shall find it if we attempt to penetrate the 
mystery, or to explain the nature of that divine inspira- 
tion which makes the Bible the Word of God. That the 
Bible as a whole is the Word of God we cannot doubt. 
It is a sun of divide truth, shining by its own light. It 



1/6 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

satisfies our reason, it commands our consciences and the 
reverent acknowledgment of mankind, it is slowly revo- 
lutionizing and transforming the world. It is a whole 
of divine truth, symmetrical, harmonious, complete. In 
every book, in every part, it is instinct with the life of 
that divine inspiration which makes it the Word of God. 
There is no book which can be spared from the sacred 
canon, no book which is not part of the Word of God. 
Yet when we take it, either book by book, or as a whole, 
and try to discover the nature, to detect the secret of 
that inspiration which makes the Bible a living body of 
truth, we find ourselves baffled and wholly at a loss. 

We shall find this true, first, if we take the Bible book 
by book. Let us begin by severing a foot, some less 
important member, from this living body of truth, and 
studying it carefully to see whether we can detect the seat 
and the secret of that inspiration by which, as it stands 
in the Bible, it is pervaded as by a principle of life. We 
will take the Book of Judges. This book is an integral 
and very important part of the Bible, an essential link in 
the sacred history which could on no account be spared. 
It is in unison and harmony with the rest of the sacred 
Book, and standing in its place as a part of the Bible, we 
cannot doubt the fact of its inspiration. But when we 
sever it from the Bible, and sit down to analyze and dis- 
sect it in the hope of discovering the secret and the 
nature of its inspiration, our quest is wholly in vain. 
From this member, thus cut off from the living whole, 
the life has fled ; it has nothing whatever to reveal. We 
cannot find out who wrote this book, nor what proof 
there is that the writer was inspired by the Holy Ghost, 
nor by what authority it was placed upon the sacred 
canon. It seems a mere chronicle of the early times of 
the Hebrew commonwealth, written by some Jewish 



INSPIRATION, THE HEBREW LANGUAGE, ETC. 177 

priest or prophet as freely and naturally, with as little 
consciousness of divine inspiration, as the history of the 
same times was afterward written by Flavius Josephus. 
From the dissection and analysis of this book we have 
evidently nothing to learn respecting the nature of divine 
inspiration. 

Let us turn then to some other and very different 
book ; some higher and more important member, the 
right arm, as we may call it, of the living body of truth. 
Such a book is the Epistle to the Hebrews ; for, surely, 
in no part of the Bible are the light and life of divine 
inspiration more clearly manifest than in this epistle. 
But when we sever it from the rest of the Bible and sit 
down to study it by itself, the secret of its inspiration is 
wholly hidden. The early churches knew nothing what- 
ever as to its authorship, nor of any evidence, except that 
which shines in the epistle itself, that its writer had been 
inspired by the Holy Ghost. The epistle had no voucher 
but itself, and for three hundred years a great part of 
the Christian community was in doubt whether or not it 
was to be received as a part of the Word of God. And 
when at last it was placed upon the sacred canon, it was 
on no other authority than that of the late and hesitating 
consent of the churches. Clearly, as to the nature and 
the mystery of divine inspiration, this most important 
member of the living body of revealed truth has nothing 
to reveal. 

Let us then leave the members of this living body of 
the Word of God, and go directly to the heart, the gospels 
of our Lord Jesus Christ. These gospels of the four 
evangelists we know are inspired. They are the very 
essence of divine and revealed truth. Yet when we 
take any one of them, sever it from the rest of the Bible, 
and sit down to dissect and analyze it in the hope of dis- 



I7 8 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

covering in it the secret and mystery of its inspiration, 
our search is wholly in vain. Like the foot and the arm, 
the dissected heart lies before us a lump of lifeless flesh. 
" Forasmuch," says Luke in opening his gospel narra- 
tive, " Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to set 
forth in order a declaration of those things which are 
most surely believed among us, even as they delivered 
them unto us, which from the beginning were eye-wit- 
nesses and ministers of the word ; it seemed good to me 
also, having had perfect understanding of all things from 
the very first, to write unto thee in order, most excellent 
Theophilus, that thou mightest know the certainty of 
those things wherein thou hast been instructed." This 
is very excellent and sensible ; a very proper introduction 
to the narrative of a man in every way qualified to write 
the story of our Lord's earthly life. But there is no 
claim, and no indication, of divine inspiration. The 
evangelist was evidently writing just as freely and naturally 
as I am in writing these words, and with just as little con- 
sciousness of any supernatural inspiration. Taking any 
one of these gospels, severing it from the rest of the 
Bible, and sitting down to dissect and examine it as care- 
fully as we may, the mystery of its inspiration is still a 
secret which we cannot find out or understand. The 
writers do not claim to have been divinely inspired ; there 
is nothing to indicate that they wrote under any stress 
or consciousness of divine inspiration ; for the fact of 
their inspiration the gospels have no vouchers but them- 
selves. To the questions how these writers were in- 
spired, and in what their inspiration consisted, the study 
of their work will give us no answer. 

Thus far our search has been wholly in vain. This 
body of revealed truth is full of life, instinct with life in 
every part, but the mystery of that life we have not 



INSPIRATION, THE HEBREW LANGUAGE, ETC. 1 79 

been able to penetrate, its nature we cannot understand. 
There remains, however, one other thing that we can do, 
one further trial that we can make. The Law of God as 
given by Moses we may well regard as the head, the 
brain, of this living body of truth. In this, if we study 
it well, we may perhaps find the hidden truth which we 
seek. As we begin our study of this divinely given Law, 
it seems at first as if we had indeed found that for which 
we had so long and so vainly sought. Here are the Ten 
Commandments, written by the finger of God upon tables 
of stone. Here is the Law, the whole constitution of 
the Hebrew Church and State, which the Lord spake 
unto Moses. " And God spake all these words, say- 
ing — " Here surely is divine inspiration clear and plain. 
And yet, as we study the matter more carefully, we see at 
once that we have made no advance toward discovering the 
truth of which we are in search. We know that God 
spake by Moses ; but the spoken word of the Lord to 
Moses is not the zvritten Bible which is to us the Word 
of God. What we want to learn is how, by what means, 
in what manner, and to what extent, these oldest books 
of the sacred canon were written by divine inspiration. 
To these questions the study of the Pentateuch will give 
us no answer. These books themselves give us no light 
upon the question of their own authorship. Nowhere in 
the Bible is it so much as intimated that Moses wrote 
these books in their completeness as they stand in our 
own Bibles. That he did not so write them is certain, be- 
cause the last chapter of Deuteronomy contains the ac- 
count of his death and burial. When or by whom they 
were written out in their completed form, or through 
what changes they passed before the time of Ezra, there 
are none to tell us. That these books were given by in- 
spiration of God we cannot doubt. But what this divine 



i8o 



FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 



influence or supervision really was, in what way, or to 
what extent, it was exercised, we cannot tell. 

These books of the Pentateuch are the work of a hu- 
man authoi or authors, and were evidently written just 
as freely and naturally, under just as little sense of divine 
constraint or control, as any other books of the ancient 
world. So, excepting the record which the prophets 
have given of divine communications made to themselves, 
it is with the whole Bible taken book by book. 

And so it is, again, with the Bible taken as a whole. 
God might have written the whole Bible, as he wrote the 
Ten Commandments, with his own finger, upon tables of 
stone. He might have made the several writers of the 
sacred books the mere involuntary mouth-pieces or aman- 
uenses of the Holy Ghost, as spiritualistic mediums are 
supposed to be of the spirits of the dead. Or, when the 
volume was at last completed, he might have given some 
voice or sign from heaven endorsing and authenticating 
the whole. None of these things has he done. No prophet 
or apostle was commissioned to collect in one volume the 
whole body of revealed truth, to seal the completed book 
by divine authority, and, with such solemn and public 
sanctions as should forever authenticate the book to all 
men as the Word of God, commit it to the keeping of the 
churches. The early Christians had no Bible. Christ 
and St. Paul had endorsed the Law, the Prophets, and 
the Psalms, as given by inspiration of God ; but the sev- 
eral writings of the New Testament had never been col- 
lected in one volume and had no such vouchers. These 
several treatises had no endorser but themselves. Each 
church could only select, on its own judgment, from the 
whole body of such writings a New Testament for itself. 
As to some of these writings, notably as to the Epistle to 
the Hebrews and the Revelation of St. John, the gravest 



INSPIRATION, THE HEBREW LANGUAGE, ETC. l8l 

doubts were long felt in many of the churches whether 
they were divinely inspired or not. It was only by the 
common and unanimous consent of the churches, after 
three hundred years of doubt and hesitation, that the 
canon was at last completed and sealed. All this was 
clearly in accordance with the divine intent. It was 
meant that we should have this treasure in earthen ves- 
sels. It was meant that the human element in the Bible 
should be full and free, and, outside of the truth divinely 
revealed, characterized by the common limitations and 
imperfections of humanity. It was meant that the Bible 
should shine like the sun by its own inherent light, with 
no other authentication or endorsement than that of its 
own truth commanding the conscience and the reason of 
men. 

In no other way, perhaps, can we obtain so good an 
idea of the nature and the methods of divine inspiration 
as by the careful and intelligent study of the earlier 
Hebrew Scriptures. Until within the past fifty years, 
except for the little told us respecting it in the Old Testa- 
ment, the old world of Nimrod and Abraham lay almost 
as completely buried in darkness and oblivion, almost as 
much forgotten and unknown, as the city of Nineveh 
had lain for ages before the grave of that once mighty 
metropolis was discovered and opened by Mr. Layard. 
Now this darkness has been dispelled. By the researches 
and discoveries of the past half century, that ancient 
world has been raised from its grave and brought forth 
into the light. Now it lies before us in its history, its 
social, political, and intellectual unfolding, its manners 
and its life, with something of the same clearness and ful- 
ness as the later development of Greece and Rome. 
These new revelations have thrown a flood of light not 
only upon the primitive condition of man and human 
society, but upon the earlier books of the Old Testament, 



182 



FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 



Ethnologically speaking, the language which gradually 
developed into the Hebrew of David and Isaiah was not 
distinctively Semitic. In the days of Abraham, Isaac, 
and Jacob, it was simply the language of Canaan ; being 
spoken alike by the Hamite Phoenicians and other Ca- 
naanite tribes, and by the Shemite Hebrews and Arabs. 
It now seems to be pretty certain that in the days of 
these patriarchs the Assyrian, Phoenician, Hebrew, and 
Arabic were all essentially one language, the Assyrian 
being the only one of the four which differed from the 
others sufficiently to make it a dialect by itself. It is yet 
more certain that when Jacob and his family migrated to 
Egypt, the Chaldaean cuneiform was the only method of 
writing as yet known in any part of Asia, unless the 
semi-cuneiform inscriptions left by the Hittites of the 
Orontes, and not yet deciphered, form a single excep- 
tion. If not the first language, Hebrew was certainly one 
of the first languages ever written with a phonetic alpha- 
bet. The Egyptian and cuneiform characters repre- 
sented, not vowel and consonant sounds, but ideas, words 
and syllables. The first truly phonetic alphabet, a few 
characters representing only the radical sounds of a lan- 
guage, and by which all the words of that language could 
be spelled, was the so-called Phoenician alphabet. This 
alphabet was used by the Phoenicians, the Hebrews, the 
Moabites, and the other peoples of that part of Syria. 
Where was this alphabet invented ? This question let 
us consider carefully. 

It was after the birth of Abraham, apparently, that the 
Canaanite tribes, migrating from the neighborhood of the 
Persian Gulf, occupied their new settlements in the Holy 
Land. They brought with them their native language, 
akin to the Chaldaean of their day, and equally akin to 
the Assyrian, — the language which seems to have been 



INSPIRATION, THE HEBREW LANGUAGE, ETC. 1 83 

spoken at that time, with only dialectic variations, by all 
the tribes of Southwestern Asia, from Nineveh to the Strait 
of Babelmandeb. They were not a literary people, and 
suprisingly few remains of any thing written by them 
have been preserved. With all their commercial and 
manufacturing industry, moreover, they were not a quick- 
witted and ingenious people. In all their art they were 
imitators rather than inventors. They had little need 
of the new alphabet, except for business purposes, and 
were not the people to strike out at once this grandest of 
all human inventions. It seems more that doubtful 
whether this alphabet in its completeness was their inven- 
tion at all. Whoever invented it, there is not the slight- 
est indication that it existed, every thing points to the 
conclusion that it did not exist, until long after the time 
of Moses. 1 

We are thus brought to a very inportant proposition, 
which I think cannot be controverted. 

The Hebrew language, as a cultivated and written lan- 
guage, distinct from Phoeriician, Arabic, and Aramcean, 
the language which has come down to us in the Hebrew 
Scriptures, had no existence until lo?ig after the time of 
Moses. 

It did not exist in the days of Abraham, Isaac, and Ja- 
cob, whose petty tribe spoke the common language of 

1 The opinion to which the best authorities now incline on this very im- 
portant subject, is that the so-called Phoenician alphabet began to be formed 
by the Phoenicians, from Egyptian sources, about or after the time of Moses. 
The Phoenicians were politically dependent upon the great kings of the 
xviii and xix Dynasties, and in all commercial and naval matters, 
formed the right arm of their power. In the time of Moses and the Exodus, 
the Phoenicians were thus living in very intimate relations with the Egyp- 
tians, and under a controlling Egyptian influence. It was, apparently, 
under these circumstances, not earlier than the Hebrew Exodus, perhaps 
many years after the Exodus, that the Phoenicians derived from the Egyptian 
hieratic characters the first idea, and the germinal forms, of those letters 
which have since been developed into the one Phonetic alphabet of the 
civilized world, or, at least, of all the civilized world west of the Indus. 



1 34 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

the tribes and peoples around them. It was not formed 
in Egypt, where the vernacular of the Hebrews, especial- 
ly during their century of bondage, must have been the 
language of the Egyptians. It was the slow develop- 
ment of Hebrew society after the settlement of the 
Israelites in the Promised Land. The inference from 
these premises is obvious. When Moses led the He- 
brews out of Egypt, the language in familiar use among 
them, in which he addressed them, and in which they re- 
ceived the Law, was not Hebrew but Egyptian. If He- 
brew had begun by this time to come into existence as a 
form of speech, it certainly did not yet exist as a written 
language. Egyptian, on the other hand, the vernacular 
of the Israelites at this time, had been for ages a highly 
cultivated language, unfolding into an immense and ex- 
ceedingly various body of literature. Moses was an 
Egyptian scholar and man of letters, learned in all the 
wisdom of the Egyptians ; and in Egyptian, beyond a 
doubt, all his speaking and all his writing were done. It 
was long after the death of Moses that both the language 
and the alphabet came into being, which were to be the 
media through which the Old Testament Scriptures were 
to be given to mankind. At the present time all things 
point to the conclusion that no beginning had been made 
in writing the Hebrew Scriptures, in the form in which 
they have come down to us, before the time of Samuel. 
The earliest reference in the Old Testament itself to 
any writing, or to any thing written, in the Hebrew lan- 
guage appears to be the record in I Samuel x, 25. "Then 
Samuel told the people the manner of the kingdom, and 
wrote it in a book, and laid it up before the Lord." The 
expression in Judges v, 14. " Out of Zebulon they that 
handle the pen of the writer," is evidently a mistrans- 
lation. It should rather read: "The staff of the leader," 



INSPIRATION, THE HEBREW LANGUAGE, ETC. I 85 

or " the rod of the numberer." The Book of Jasher, the 
oldest of the post-Mosaic books, was written after the ac- 
cession of David, as appears from 2 Samuel, i, 18. There 
is nothing to indicate that through all the long period 
from Caleb to Samuel, after the Egyptian had been for- 
gotten, the Hebrews had any knowledge of the art of 
writing, or any thing in writing that they could read or 
understand. There is no reference to the Book of the 
Law ; no such book seems to be known to either peo- 
ple or priest. This remark applies to Samuel himself. 
This great prophet, priest, and judge appears to conduct 
his high offices with no reference to, or knowledge of, a 
Book of the Law, and following only the traditions of 
his people and divine instructions communicated to 
himself. It seems clear that Hebrew writing began in 
the schools of the prophets under the supervision of 
Samuel, and that Samuel himself was the first Hebrew 
writer. Nor is any other hypothesis more probable than 
that this great man, the father of Jewish letters and 
founder of the Jewish state, should have developed and 
perfected the alphabet with which he wrote. 

If further investigation and more perfect knowledge 
shall sustain and establish the views which I have now 
presented, two conclusions will follow, which must be 
accepted as fundamental propositions in the study of 
the Old Testament Scriptures. 

I. — Until after the time of Samuel, the earlier books of 
the Old Testament existed in a form very widely different 
from that in which they have come down to us. 

To Samuel, and the earliest Hebrew writers after him, 
these books must have come partly in the form of un- 
written tradition, and partly in the form of documents 
more or less fully written out in Egyptian, or in some 



1 86 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

other language, dialect, or mode of writing quite differ- 
ent from their own now pure and fully developed Hebrew. 
The Book of Genesis must have existed, until long after 
the time of Joseph, only as the unwritten traditions of 
the Hebrew race. It seems to have been not much ear- 
lier than B. C. 1500 that the Assyrian kings first brought 
to their own capital the cuneiform mode of writing, and 
a body of Chaldseans to act as their scribes in the use of 
it. We may hold it as certain that when Jacob and his 
family settled in Egypt no Shemite people had ever had 
a written language. 

The divine revelations contained in the Book of Genesis 
appear to have been made from time to time to one and 
another of the patriarchs through the entire period of 
the Patriarchal Dispensation. Nor are we to suppose 
that these revelations were given in their maturity and 
completeness once for all. As in the case of later proph- 
ecy, there was evidently a growth and development in 
this earlier body of revealed truth. A vague and dis- 
torted account of the six days of creation is found 
among the cuneiform inscriptions, which appears to have 
come down from the old Accadians. This seems to 
indicate that the story of the Creation had already 
been partially revealed in the time of Noah ; but for 
that revelation in its completeness, as we read it upon 
the sacred page, we must look to some prophet more 
gifted, and of later date, perhaps to Abraham, more 
probably to Moses. Who first gathered up the sacred 
traditions of the Hebrew race, and wrote them out in the 
Book of Genesis, we cannot tell. It is possible that this 
work had been done in Egypt before the time of Moses. 
Under the Shepherd Kings, there may well have been, 
among the kindred of Joseph, cultured and well-educated 
men, entirely competent for such a work. This, however, 



INSPIRATION, THE HEBREW LANGUAGE, ETC. 1 87 

is not probable. We have much better reason for believ- 
ing, as has always been believed, that Moses was the first 
writer of the Book of Genesis. Moses was an Egyptian 
scholar and man of letters, more deeply interested than 
any other man could be in preserving these sacred tradi- 
tions of his race, better qualified than any other man for 
the work to be done, and we can hardly doubt that by 
him this book was written. 

That Moses wrote out at least the substance of the other 
four books of the Pentateuch is distinctly and repeatedly 
affirmed in those books themselves. In Deut. xxxi, 24- 
26, we read: "And it came to pass when Moses had 
made an end of writing the words of this law in a book, 
until they were finished, that Moses commanded the Le- 
vites, which bore the ark of the covenant of the Lord, 
saying: Take this book of the law, and put it in the side 
of the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God, that it 
may be there for a witness against thee." Here we 
have a distinct account, not only of the authorship of the 
Book of the Law, but of the measures taken to preserve 
it, until the, as yet, far-distant age, when the Hebrew 
people could receive in their own written language these 
oracles of God. As Moses left these records of the Pen- 
tateuch, so no doubt they remained in the time of Sam- 
uel ; still intact and complete, but in a foreign language 
which, perhaps, no Hebrew could read and understand. 
If the views I have now presented are correct, when 
Samuel came to man's estate, not only had he no Book of 
the Law which he could read for instruction and guid- 
ance, but all after Moses, 1 in the literature of his country, 
was as yet nothing more than unwritten poetry or tradi- 
tion. It seems clear, that when David came to the 
throne, of the Book of Jasher, and the books of Joshua, 

1 Or, at the farthest, after Joshua. 



1 88 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

Judges, Ruth, and Samuel, as they now stand, not one 
word had been committed to writing. Samuel, apparent- 
ly the first Hebrew writer, made some beginning in com- 
posing the annals of his people ; and some record of the 
life and exploits of Joshua may well have been made in 
Egyptian, which in his day must have been still the 
spoken language of himself and his people. But we may 
affirm confidently that at this time no beginning had as 
yet been made in writing any part of the Bible in the 
form in which it has come down to us. Those finished 
and elegant Hebrew writings, which form the earlier 
books of our Old Testament Scriptures, must have been 
the work of a later and more cultivated generation. 

II. — The Old Testament in its entirety was the fruit 
and the work of the Church of the Old Dispensation after 
it had attained to its most perfect culture, its full social, 
intellectual, and spiritual development. 

From the beginning God had been revealing, through 
one and another of his servants, that measure of his truth 
which the world needed and was prepared to receive. 
Through Moses, the greatest of the prophets, he had 
given to the Church and the world a full revelation of 
his Law. The hypothesis of Prof. Robertson Smith — that 
Moses left behind him in writing but little more of the 
Law that bears his name than the Ten Commandments; 
that the Law, as it now stands recorded in the Penta- 
teuch, had no existence before the time of Isaiah ; that 
the last four books of the Pentateuch were written by 
some of the later prophets, who, divinely inspired for 
their work, took the Mosaic idea and developed it into 
an elaborate system for the government of the Jewish 
Church and people after their return from the Babylonish 
captivity ; and that it was only by a kind of legal fiction 
that these books were referred to Moses — we cannot for a 



INSPIRATION, THE HEBREW LANGUAGE, ETC. 1 89 

moment accept. The Holy Ghost did not so stoop to a 
pious fraud. The Bible does not affirm a falsehood when 
it declares that the Lord spake unto Moses all the words 
of this Law. The books of the Law have all the marks 
of having been written in the times to which they refer, 
and no author certainly ever enstamped the impress of 
his own spirit and genius upon his work more deeply 
than Moses has upon the Book of Deuteronomy. We 
believe and must believe that Moses wrote those books 
substantially as they stand to-day. But we must also 
believe that when Samuel and David arose to build upon 
the old foundations the grand superstructure of the Jew- 
ish Church and State, all these old revelations, all that 
was remembered of the dealings of God with man in all 
the ages of the past, existed only in the form of unwritten 
tradition, or of divinely inspired records in a foreign and 
unknown tongue. These crude materials of Holy Writ 
were to be taken in hand, and wrought over into that 
perfect word which was to remain to all coming time the 
light of the world, by a new order of prophets ; an order 
of men not only divinely inspired, but trained and formed 
under the higher culture, and in the larger views and 
conceptions of the fully established kingdom of God. 

It was in this new and higher order of things, in which 
men like Nathan, Elijah, and Isaiah were the messengers 
of God to men, that we must believe the whole of the 
Old Testament to have been written in its final and 
permanent form. In the course of this long period, ex- 
tending from Samuel to Malachi, holy men of God, hav- 
ing now at their command, for the first time in the history 
of mankind, a noble and affluent language well fitted to 
be the medium of a new and more perfect revelation, as 
they were moved by the Holy Ghost, wrote in their own 
Hebrew tongue all the books 1 of the Old Testament 

1 Unless the Prophecy of Daniel be an exception. 



igO FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

Scriptures. They recorded at length, and in many differ- 
ent treatises, the history of the kingdom of God in their 
own land. They wrote out that wonderful body of poetry, 
philosophy, and prophecy, which was the noblest and 
most precious fruitage of the intellectual and religious 
life of their people. And, finally, although this work 
seems not to have been fully accomplished until near the 
close of the prophetic period, they translated and gave 
to the Church and the world the old Mosaic records, the 
full text of the divine law. 

If this view is correct, it may well be regarded as in- 
volving a great mystery. We are taught that the Law 
was given by Moses with wonderful manifestations of 
the divine glory, and awful solemnities of the divine 
sanction, in minute and elaborate detail, and in syste- 
matic completeness. Yet we are to believe that it was 
so given only to remain for a thousand years almost 
wholly in abeyance ; to remain hidden and unknown in 
a foreign tongue, until the people for whose benefit it 
had been given had ceased to exist as an independent 
nation. At first thought, this certainly seems one of 
the strangest things in human history. Yet it may be 
that in a careful study of the circumstances of the case, 
the explanation of this seeming mystery will clearly ap- 
pear. 

Whatever the divine purpose may have been in giving 
the Law, that purpose was fully realized in the event. If, 
therefore, we would learn what this purpose was, and 
find the explanation of any seeming mysteries in matters 
relating to the Law, what we have to do is to study care- 
fully the facts of later Jewish history. Now the leading, 
controlling facts in the history of the Jewish Church, so 
far as they relate to our present purpose, are few and 
clear. The whole system was ordained and directed to 



INSPIRATION, THE HEBREW LANGUAGE, ETC. 191 

prepare the way for Christ and Christianity. This pre- 
paratory work, which was perfectly accomplished, con- 
sisted in two grand developments, which were equally 
important, equally essential to the end in view. These 
were, first, the development, or production, of the Old 
Testament Scriptures ; and, secondly, and later in point 
of time, the development of the Jewish people. As the 
Old Testament Scriptures were the divine revelation on 
which the Gospel of Christ was to be founded, so the 
Jewish people was the necessary foundation of the Chris- 
tian Church. There could have been no New Testament 
without the Old ; no Christian Church without the Jew- 
ish people. As a people, the Jews had received an intel- 
lectual training and culture such as no other people, 
except the Greeks, had ever enjoyed ; while religiously, 
they had received a thoroughness of instruction and 
education such as no other people had ever known. 
Thus prepared, this people had been strangely scattered 
throughout the whole civilized world. Go where they 
would, the first Christian preachers found in every city 
and town a community of Jews, affording, with its Gen- 
tile sympathizers and semi-converts, a ready-gathered 
congregation in which the Gospel could be preached, 
and from which the nucleus of a Christian church could 
be drawn. 

In the careful study of these two mutually related 
facts, we shall find what seems to be the full explanation 
of the mystery under consideration. Professor Robert- 
son Smith and others have shown conclusively that until 
the return from Babylon the Mosaic Law was never fully 
established among the Jewish people, was never clearly 
understood by them. This was plainly in accordance 
with the divine intent, and with the necessities of the 
case. After the return from Babylon, among a more 



192 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

intelligent people, and in a more highly civilized age, 
the Law soon became familiarly known and fully estab- 
lished in practical operation. Then, under the Law, be- 
gan the long drill and discipline of the Jewish people. 
The results of this long training, in that fixed, unchange- 
able character which it gave to the Jews, are perhaps 
without a parallel in history. Its end was perfectly ac- 
complished in preparing the way for the establishment 
of Christianity. But it was an iron rule, a stern and re- 
lentless discipline, under which no freedom of thought 
or opinion could exist. Under this rigid bondage to the 
Law, the light of Old Testament prophecy was speedily 
and finally quenched. 

It is in this quick suffocation of all prophetic activity un- 
der the full reign of the Law, beyond a doubt, that we 
are to find the reason why that reign was so long de- 
layed. The first and great end of the Jewish system was 
to be the production of the Old Testament Scriptures. 
But this grand result was to be the fruit of prophecy, the 
work of the prophetic order. It was necessary, therefore, 
that the course of things should be so ordered as to pro- 
vide a full and fair field for prophetic activity, and perfect 
freedom for the prophetic mind. An iron reign of the 
Law, like that which followed the return from Babylon, 
would have been fatal to such a purpose. We are safe in 
assuming that if the Law had been fully established with 
the conquest of Joshua, the prophetic order would never 
have run its grand career, the Old Testament would 
never have been written. It was with wisdom truly di- 
vine that the whole course of events was directed. Until 
the prophetic order had done its work, and that full free- 
dom might be allowed for that work, the Law was held 
in abeyance, operative only in its main outlines, its great 
and essential principles. Then the Law was set up, in 



INSPIRATION, THE HEBREW LANGUAGE, ETC. 1 93 

fullest authority and vigor, to accomplish the second 
grand result, the training and discipline of the Jewish 
people. 

From this survey of the Old Testament Scriptures two 
inferences seem to follow, which are equally applicable 
to the whole Bible, and which may be laid down as 
canons fundamental to the subject of Divine Inspiration. 

i . — The several books of the Bible were written freely, 
under no consciousness of divine constraint. 

So far as we can see, there is not a book in the Bible 
which was not written in the full and free exercise of the 
author's own powers, under no consciousness of the con- 
straining influence of the Holy Spirit. It is evident that 
all the writing, translating, revising, and changing of all 
these books was done under a divine supervision which 
made them just what they needed to be, just what it was 
the divine intent that they should be, as component 
parts of the sacred canon. But this divine supervision ap- 
pears to have been something of which the several writers 
had no consciousness. They evidently thought, com- 
posed, and wrote exactly like other men. The prophets 
knew that they had seen the visions of God, that they 
were the fully authorized messengers of God to men. 
But when they sat down to write out their prophecies, 
they seem to have written just as freely, under just as lit- 
tle consciousness of a divine constraining power, as the 
minister of to-day writes when preparing his sermon for 
the Sabbath service. 

Just so it appears to have been with the evangelists 
and apostles of the New Testament. They knew that 
they were divinely taught to be teachers of men ; but 
there is nowhere the slightest indication that they were 
conscious of a divine control in the choice of language 



194 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

and the act of composition, as they wrote their several 
treatises. The truth which they were to make known 
they had been divinely taught ; the words and the writ- 
ing were their own. With the historical writers of both 
the Old Testament and the New, the case is even 
stronger. Under a divine supervision, of which they 
were not conscious, and which is known to us only 
from its results, the authors of the books of Joshua, 
Judges, Samuel; Kings, Chronicles, and the Acts of the 
Apostles, seem to have written as mere historians, 
without a thought of divine inspiration. The conclu- 
sion seems unavoidable that the writing of the Bible, 
in every book and every part, was freely done by hu- 
man authors, without any consciousness or knowledge 
of supernatural control. 

2. — From this prominence and freedom of the human 
element in the production of the Bible, there results, furtlier, 
an element of uncertainty, which is equally prominent, and 
equally characteristic of the sacred volume. 

No lover of the Bible can have thoroughly studied its 
several books and their history, without becoming pain- 
fully conscious of this uncertainty, which, like an obscuring 
cloud hangs over all the light of these divine revelations. 
The Old Testament is full of uncertainty. In regard to 
many of its books we do not know when or by whom they 
were written, through what translations or changes they 
have passed, nor by whose hand, or on what authority, 
they were given their final and permanent form, and placed 
upon the sacred canon. On a multitude of points the 
Septuagint, the Bible of the apostles and early Chris- 
tians, differs widely from the received Hebrew text ; and 
in many of these discrepancies which of the two is right, 
and which is wrong, or whether either of the two is liter- 
ally and verbally correct, none can tell. 



INSPIRATION, THE HEBREW LANGUAGE, ETC. 1 95 

Just the same thing is true, although in a lower de- 
gree, of that which forms the foundation and the life of 
the New Testament, the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. 
That the gospels of the four evangelists were all and 
equally written under a divine guidance and inspiration, 
we cannot for a moment doubt. Christ the Lord lives, 
and speaks, and works in them in the fulness of his 
divine presence and life. They are truth, pure and 
unalloyed, and as such, they command the reason and 
the consciences of men. Yet for any certainty of ab- 
solute, verbal exactness in the reports which the evan- 
gelists have given us of the Master's discourses and 
teachings, we shall seek in vain. It is conceded that 
Mark and Luke were not disciples and followers of Christ 
during his lifetime, that they have given us their gospels 
wholly at second-hand. And any one who will read 
Dean Milman's judicious remarks upon this subject, 1 will 
see how little we know about the earlier documents 
which they used in compiling their narratives, or from 
what sources their information was drawn. Matthew 
and John, indeed, were intimately associated with Christ 
through the whole of his public ministry; and were eye- 
and ear-witnesses of that which they recorded. But 
they never thought of trying to give a complete and ver- 
batim report of their Master's words. That their in- 
spiration was not of such a character as to ensure verbal 
exactness in their reports and citations is clear from the 
record itself. Their citations from the prophets, and of 
the inscription upon the cross, are from memory and in 
substance, and make no attempt at verbal accuracy. 
The same thing is manifestly true of their reports of their 
Master's teaching. They have given a brief epitome or 
outline of, or collection of extracts from, a mass of dis- 



i (< 



History of Christianity," Book i, Appendix ii. 



196 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

courses and teachings, which, if verbally and fully re- 
ported, would have filled a volume larger than the whole 
Bible. They assert no claim for themselves to divine in- 
spiration, and appear to have written mainly from mem- 
ory, and long after their Master's ascension to heaven. 
The record of each of these writers, moreover, is strongly 
colored by his own individuality. In style, cast of 
thought, and mode of expression, the Christ of John dif- 
fers from the Christ of Matthew as much as John and 
Matthew differed from each other. Taking all things 
into the account, we seem compelled to believe that 
these evangelists made no attempt to give exact and 
verbatim reports of any of their Master's teachings ; but 
only to give correctly, with perfect truthfulness, and, as 
far as possible, in his own words, the substance of what 
he had said. That they have done this, under the 
guidance of divine inspiration, we have not the shadow 
of doubt. We have a true record of the Master's 
teachings and wonderful works. But when we seek for 
the exact form of words in which he spoke, we know not 
where to find it. We may well doubt whether there is 
so much as one verse or sentence in the whole New Testa- 
ment in which we can be sure that we have the ipsis- 
sima verba, the very words, just as they were spoken, of 
the Master himself. 

This is a strange fact. It is more than strange, it is a 
painful fact. We long for certainty, not in the truth and 
spirit alone, but in the words of the sacred volume. And 
when we cannot find this certainty, we cry out in bitter 
disappointment, as if our faith had no sure ground on 
which to rest. And yet, nothing is surer than that this veil 
of uncertainty was left over the whole Bible of clear and 
positive purpose. There was no need of such uncertainty. 
The Bible might just as well have been so given that 



INSPIRATION, THE HEBREW LANGUAGE, ETC. 1 97 

every sentence, and every word, should bear the seal and 
impress of the inspiring Spirit, as to have been written as 
it was. Why did not Christ write his own Gospel, so that 
every word of his teaching should be authenticated by 
his own hand? Or, if this could not be, because it was 
needful that his Gospel should be embodied in the story 
of his life, why did he not appoint some specially fitted 
disciple to write his Gospel, and give to this record his 
own supervision and endorsement ? Neither of these 
things, nor any such thing, did he do. It almost seems 
as if he never gave so much as a thought to the prepara- 
tion of an authentic and perfect record of his teachings 
for the instruction of his Church in after time. This ab- 
sence of all certainty in regard to the language of so much 
of the Bible, and in regard to the nature and extent of its 
inspiration, was not the result of accident, or of oversight. 
In this respect the Bible is just what God meant it should 
be, has perfectly realized the divine intent. 

If we study the matter carefully, it may be that we 
shall see the reason why it was the will and purpose of 
God that this obscuring veil of uncertainty should so 
cover the literal form, the language, the letter of his holy 
Word. Just before he left them, the Master said to his 
disciples : " I have yet many things to say unto you, but 
ye cannot bear them now." 1 These words involve a 
principle which applies to the whole revelation, and to 
all revelations, of divine truth. The truth of God, as it 
can be received and understood by the human mind, is 
not unchangeably one and the same ; it cannot be fixed, 
once and for all, in any statements or forms of words. It 
is a body of truth always changing, ever enlarging, grow- 
ing, expanding. For this reason, any fixed, precise, dog- 
matic statement of an article or principle of religious 

1 John xvi, 12. 



I98 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

belief can never be any thing more than a half truth, 
imperfect, one-sided and misleading. To this great fact it 
was needful that the method of divine revelation should 
conform ; and to this fact it does conform. It was meant 
that the Bible should not come to men as a scientific 
text-book of religious truth, of which every passage, 
every sentence, every word, were to be interpreted for- 

Iever, with mathematical precision, in their most exact and 
literal sense. It was meant that the Bible should contain 
no fixed and unchangeable dogmas, to become the ele- 
ments of one perpetual and immutable creed. It was 
meant that whoever would know the truth should find it, 
not by searching the Bible for detached sentences and 
dogmatic statements, not by subtle exegesis and the 
minute study of words, but by the broad and general 
study of all that God has revealed in his two Books, 
comparing Scripture with Scripture, and Scripture with 
Providence. 






CHAPTER XIV. 

KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 

Can God be known, or can he not be known, by the 
human mind? Can the eternal One, the infinite, omni- 
present, omnipotent, and omniscient Spirit be compre- 
hended and known by mortal man ? This is one of the deep 
questions of our religion, and one which we shall do well to 
study carefully in the light both of the Scriptures and of 
reason. Two propositions seem to cover this question 
in all its length and breadth. 

I. — In a certain limited sense, God is like us, and can be 
clearly known by us. 

This the Bible declares at the outset, in the plainest 
and most positive terms, in that one short sentence, 
which is the foundation-stone and key-note of the whole 
system of revealed truth : " So God created man in his 
own image." Thus, in the beginning God created man 
like himself, as far as the finite can be like the infinite, 
in every characteristic and attribute of his essential nat- 
ure. It is because God so created men, that they can 
know him, are held bound to know him. " My son," 
says dying David to Solomon, " know thou the God of 
thy fathers"; and St. Paul tells us that the heathen are 
without excuse, in that they are not willing to know the 
God who has so clearly revealed himself in all his works, 
and in themselves. We can know God, and do know 
him, because he is like ourselves. 

The foundation of all our knowledge is our knowledge 

199 



200 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

of ourselves. The basis and starting-point of all that we 
can ever know, is the consciousness of our existence. 
First of all, we know ourselves, our own individual exist- 
ence, our own desires, feelings, hopes, pleasures, and 
pains; our own powers, plans, purposes, and modes of 
action. Then, from ourselves, comparing them with our- 
selves, and because they are like ourselves, we learn to 
know other men. We feel, and very soon have evidence 
by which we know, that other men are just like ourselves ; 
that they feel as we feel, suffer as we suffer, find pleasure 
in that which pleases us, are endowed with the same fac- 
ulties and powers, are governed by the same motives and 
laws. In a word, we know other men because they are 
like ourselves. 

It is from this knowledge of ourselves and of other 
men that we rise to our knowledge of God ; to all the 
knowledge of God that the Bible teaches us, all the 
knowledge of God of which we are capable. In every 
point in which the Bible reveals God to us we are able 
to understand and know him, because we see in him a 
superior, a divine likeness to ourselves. First of all, and 
upon every page of the Bible, he reveals himself as a 
conscious, individual Being, personal, self-acting, and in- 
telligent. We read the teaching and understand it well, 
because in what he has thus revealed of himself, we see 
a conscious, individual Being like ourselves. 

Next, he declares of himself: "I am the almighty 
God." All through the Bible, in a hundred different 
ways, we are taught that he is a God of omnipotent 
power. This, too, we understand ; for we see clearly 
that this almighty power of God, not in degree indeed, 
but in kind, is just like the power which resides in our 
human wills, and which we exercise every day. 

We are taught that in the beginning God created the 



KNO W LEDGE OF GOD. 201 

heaven and the earth ; that he formed all things that 
breathe, all things that live, all things that are ; that year 
by year he renews the face of the earth, that he cares and 
provides for every creature that his hand has made. The 
view here opened to our mental vision is high and vast, 
yet this revelation of God, as the God of creation and 
providence, we well and clearly understand, because in all 
this he is like ourselves. In our little spheres we are 
continually doing the same. 

We are taught that by wisdom he founded the earth, 
that all things are naked and open to his all-seeing eye, 
that in him are depths of wisdom and knowledge un- 
searchable and past finding out. Unsearchable, and past 
finding out, they are indeed ; yet, in all the infinitude 
of his wisdom and knowledge, we feel and know that 
God is like ourselves, that our nature is in this respect, 
and pre-eminently in this respect, the true image of the 
divine. 

We are taught that he is holy and pure, righteous and 
just; that he is merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and 
abundant in goodness and truth. And in all these attri- 
butes of our God Ave, if we will, may know him as he is. 
For, holy and just, forgiving, good and pure, ought we 
also to be. And so if we go through point by point with 
all that the Scriptures teach us of God, first as a moral 
being; then as an intellectual being, a being of mind, of 
thought and reason, of wisdom and knowledge ; and then 
as an active and executive being, a being of creating, up- 
holding, and governing power, we shall find that every 
moral, every intellectual, every executive attribute which 
the Scriptures ascribe to God, is the attribute also and 
equally of the ideally perfect man. 

The same thing is yet more clearly seen in the rela- 
tions which the Bible everywhere speaks of God as 



202 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

maintaining with his people. There can be no nearer 
relationship, no closer likeness, between two different in- 
dividuals, than the relationship and the likeness of the 
father to his children. The son derives his being from 
his father ; he is like his father in every feature, faculty, 
power, and function in body and in mind. But every- 
where in the Bible, and with strongest emphasis, God 
speaks of himself as the Father of those who love him 
and walk in his fear. When ye pray say : " Our Father 
which art in heaven." " For," says St. Paul to the Athe- 
nians, "we are all his offspring." "Therefore," says our 
Lord, again, "take no thought, saying: What shall we 
eat, or what shall we drink, or wherewithal shall we be 
clothed ? for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have 
need of all these things." " Wherefore," says St. Paul, 
citing from the Old Testament prophets, " come out from 
among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and 
touch not the unclean thing ; and I will receive you, and 
will be a Father unto you, and ye shall be my sons and 
daughters, saith the Lord Almighty." But if there is 
any thing in existence that the child can thoroughly 
know, it is the father who begat him, whose very being 
is reproduced in his own. And if God is our Father, 
and we are his sons and daughters, surely we can know 
him, and love him, and trust in him. 

But, in the contemplation of this truth, we are able to 
rise to loftier heights, and into clearer light, even than 
this. Not by words and divine declarations does the 
Bible most clearly and most powerfully teach us that 
God is like us and can be known by us. In Jesus of 
Nazareth the divine and the human have been united in 
one. The Word, which was with God, and was God, be- 
came flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory. 
Here we rise far above the old primeval declaration that 



KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 203 

man is the image of the divine. For Jesus Christ, while 
very man, bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, is also 
verv God, God incarnate in human form. In him God 
and man are* made one. This human Saviour, whose 
name is Emmanuel, which is, being interpreted, God 
with us, walked the earth in lowliest guise, mingling 
freely with his fellow-men, sharing all their experiences, 
hungering and thirsting, hoping, fearing, suffering, tried 
and tempted, and dying at last in agonies of shame. 
Much, by the teachings of his Word, we had known of 
God before. But in Christ his Son he stands clearly, so 
far as he can be to our finite capacity, he stands wholly 
revealed. We know him, not merely as like us in his 
attributes, we know him in our own nature, our elder 
Brother, our Helper, our Friend. With Christ the 
eternal Word, we too are the sons of God, children and 
heirs of the same Father, joint-heirs with Jesus Christ. 

Thus, on almost every page, and with ever clearer 
light, with ever-culminating power, does the Bible teach 
us that God may be clearly known and apprehended by 
us. It teaches us that we are fully capable of under- 
standing his nature, his character, his law and govern- 
ment, his principles and modes of action, his feelings and 
purposes, because we are his offspring, sprung from his 
being, made in his image ; because he is our Father, and 
we, if we love him, and walk in his fear, are sons and 
daughters of the Lord Almighty. 

According to the measure of our little capacity we can 
know God. And yet : " Who by searching can find out 
God ? who can find out the Almighty unto perfection ? " 
How can the finite measure the infinite ? How can the 
mortal and fleshly fully comprehend the spiritual and 
divine? We are thus brought to our second proposi- 
tion. 



204 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

II. — In that he is a spirit, infinite in his being and 
eternal in his existence, he is not like us, we cannot know 
him as he is, we can form no true conception of his being 
and his nature. 

When we read of God in the Bible as the Creator, 
Upholder, and Governor of all things; as our Father 
and bountiful Benefactor ; as good and just, forgiving 
and full of compassion, it seems to us at first that we 
know him perfectly, with as full and complete apprehen- 
sion as we know one another. But when we come to 
think of him more particularly ; when we try to form 
some distinct conception of him as a personal Being, we 
find ourselves at once baffled and wholly at a loss. We 
cannot by searching find out God. For he is a Spirit, 
the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God. 

God is a Spirit. No man hath seen him, or can see 
him. .He has neither form, nor parts, nor properties, nor 
place. We cannot think of him as here or there. He 
is everywhere, like the viewless air. He filleth immensity 
with his presence. He pervades and fills the universe, 
yet the universe cannot limit or contain him. Far be- 
yond the utmost verge of created things his omnipres- 
ence stretches on and on to infinity itself. An infinite 
Spirit. What idea, what conception can we form of such 
a God? In this we cannot know him ; he is not like us ; 
there is in our nature no measure, no criterion of such 
a Being. 

It is just the same when we try to form any distinct 
conception of God as eternal in his existence ; existing 
from eternity to eternity, without beginning, without end. 
We believe that our own existence shall never end. But 
we were created at the first, and we cannot conceive of 
ourselves as existing without a beginning. No more can 
we conceive of God as existing without a beginning. Yet 



KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 205 

he must have so existed, or he would not be God. There 
was no other God from whom his being could have been 
derived. From eternity he has been God alone. That from 
the first beginning of created things, from the first begin- 
ning of the planning of created things, God has existed and 
reigned as King supreme, we can understand. But carry- 
back the point of this beginning as far as we may, to the 
longest period of past duration over which the imagina- 
tion is able to stretch ; and then, beyond this utmost 
conceivable point of duration past, it is eternity still. 
There, as here, we can only say : From eternity, without 
beginning, God has existed, and from eternity to eternity 
he is the same. And if backward through this eternity 
we try to follow the being of God, it is still the same. 
On and on we pierce, until we seem to have measured 
eternity itself, and still it is eternity beyond. But what 
idea can we form to ourselves of God, as thus existing, 
alone, alone, in the void and emptiness of infinite space, 
through all the eternities before the first beginning of 
created things? Of this eternal existence of God we 
can form no conception at all. In this he is not like us, 
we cannot know and comprehend him. And when we 
try to fathom the depth of this unsearchable mystery, we 
only lose ourselves in the idle vagaries of vain specula- 
tion. 

So it is again when we try to conceive of God as an 
infinite Being; infinite in greatness, in power, in knowl- 
edge and wisdom, and in his eternal omniscience. We 
can describe such a God in words, but when we try to 
form to ourselves any distinct conception of what the 
words mean, we cannot do it. We say that God is in- 
finite in his being, the Author of all things, the Cause 
and End of all things. But if this is so, then everything 
that is, every thing that ever shall be, must have existed 



206 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

in him from eternity, first in thought, conception, and 
purpose, then in actual reality. But if this is so, then all 
things must have been present to his view from eternity in 
infinite and absolute foreknowledge. To all the eternity 
to come, there can never be one creature, one thing, one 
act, one sin, one thought, which has not from eternity been 
perfectly, vividly present to the mind and omniscient 
view of God. All this seems very certain ; but pause 
a moment, and see to what strange conclusions we are 
coming. If all this is so, then to the mind of God, from 
eternity to eternity, there can be nothing new. There can 
be no new view of things, no new idea or thought, no new 
emotion or experience ; there can be no disappointment, 
no pleasing surprise, no hope, no fear, no anger, no re- 
gret, no pleasure, and no pain. There can be no volition, 
no exercise of will, no sovereign authority, no controlling 
power, no directing providence, and no fatherly care ; be- 
cause all things that are or ever shall be, in form, man- 
ner, and circumstance, were fully, perfectly included in 
the omnipotent fiat which called the universe into being, 
and started the stupendous whole upon its everlasting 
unfolding. After that one exercise of omnipotent power, 
there remains nothing to be added, nothing to be done. 
So we may go on, until we have eliminated every at- 
tribute of personality from the divine, until we come to 
the pantheism of our modern materialists, or the subtler 
pantheism of the old Hindu philosophy ; making God 
nothing more than the unintelligent, impassive, imper- 
sonal soul of the universe, and say : God is all things and 
all things are God. For, we should have to go but a few 
steps further in this course of reasoning before we came 
to the conclusion that the original fiat, which started the 
universe upon its vast unfolding, was not the intelligent 
volition of a personal God, but only a necessary unfolding 
of the impersonal Divine. 



KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 20J 

When we shrink back appalled from this utter negation 
and denial of all that the Bible teaches us ; from this blot- 
ting out of existence of our dear and blessed Father in 
heaven, with all his power, his gracious providence, and his 
tender love, we begin to see how true it is that in that we 
are finite and God is infinite, he is not like us, and we 
cannot comprehend him and know him as he is. We 
believe that God is eternal and infinite in his being, but 
we learn to hold this great truth meekly and by faith, as 
a deep mystery which we cannot fathom, cannot under- 
stand. 

It is so, finally, when we try fully to understand the 
manifestations by which the One Infinite and Eternal 
Spirit has revealed himself to the knowledge of men. He 
has made himself known to us in a threefold manifesta- 
tion as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. In this 
is the crowning mystery of the Godhead, the mystery of 
the One in Three, for God is One. " I am the Lord, and 
there is none else ; there is no God beside me." Yet the 
Father is God. " To us there is one God, the Father, of 
whom are all things, and we in him." And Christ the 
Son is God. " In the beginning was the Word, and the 
Word was with God, and the Word was God ; and the 
Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we be- 
held his glory." And the Holy Ghost is God, — the 
Spirit of God, God himself abiding in the souls of men. 
What shall we say of this seeming contradiction ? There 
is but one thing which we can say. In this is a mystery 
of the divine nature which we cannot fully fathom or 
understand. God is an infinite Spirit ; and in that he is 
such, he is not like us, we cannot know him as he is. 
We cannot understand fully either his being, or his modes 
of action, or his manifestations of himself. We believe 
in the Bible as a true Word of God, because it fully ac- 



208 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

credits itself to our reason. And because the Bible so 
teaches us, although we cannot understand the mys- 
tery, we believe in God the Father, God the Son, and 
God the Holy Ghost, one God, personal, individual, indi- 
visible, in a threefold manifestation of himself to finite 
minds. 

As we study carefully the teaching of the Bible in re- 
gard to the triune God, we find it, like every thing else in 
this sacred book, very simple, and fully commending itself 
to our reason. God the Father, the eternal Jehovah, the 
infinite Spirit, is our Creator and King. More than this, 
he is our Preserver, our bountiful Benefactor, and our 
loving Father. His mercy toward us is full and bound- 
less ; and it was his eternal purpose, by his redeeming 
grace, to recover us from our lost estate, and bring us, in 
unity with himself, to the glory of his heavenly kingdom. 
But God the infinite Spirit we could not know. We could 
not understand his purposes, or reciprocate his love, or 
be saved by his grace. To fulfil his purposes of mercy 
he must come nearer to us. He must descend to our low- 
liness ; must manifest himself in a form which should 
command our sympathy and our love. This he did. In 
the person of Jesus of Nazareth he humbled himself to 
assume our nature. He became incarnate in a human 
Saviour, who is at once the Son of God, and the Son of 
Man. This stooping of the Infinite was not in vain. 
God in Christ is reconciling the world unto himself. 

All that the Bible teaches us about religion is based 
upon this one idea — God with us ; God our Father, we 
his children, God and man joined together in holy and 
everlasting unity. Christ while on the earth was God 
with us. That was his name. But he could not abide 
here in the flesh, he must ascend to his heavenly throne. 
Yet in his departing he would not leave his Church be- 



KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 209 

reaved and alone. " It is better for you," he said, " that I 
go away. For, if I go away, I will send you another Com- 
forter, even the Spirit of Truth, which shali abide with 
you forever." This promise was fulfilled. The Holy 
Spirit descended upon the waiting disciples and filled 
their souls, — descended, not for a day, or a year, but to 
abide forever. And so, in the place of Christ, and more 
than he could be, in his human and bodily form, to his 
Church, the Holy Spirit became, and still remains, and 
shall remain to the end of time, God with us and in us, 
the very Spirit and presence of the living God in his 
Church, and in the souls of all believing men. And so, 
upon all the saints and faithful in Christ Jesus, the love 
of God our Father, and the grace of our Lord Jesus 
Christ, and the communion of the Holy Spirit are and 
forever abide. 



CHAPTER XV. 

THE MAN DIVINE. 

The union of the divine and human in the person of 
Christ is the great mystery of our religion. To many, 
the doctrine has seemed a contradiction in terms, impos- 
sible and absurd. 1 Yet to this doctrine the New Testa- 
ment is most positively committed, and we have no 
choice but to believe it, or to reject the New Testament 
altogether as a book divinely inspired. But if the New 
Testament is a divinely inspired book, there is certainly 
nothing in it contrary to reason ; nor is there any thing 
of which we may not hope that the human mind, in 
due time, and when properly instructed, will be able to 
see the reasonableness and the explanation. The whole 
truth in regard to the great mystery of "God manifest in 
the flesh," we certainly cannot yet explain ; but it may 
be that from the point of view of positions already taken 
in these theses, we shall be able to see how there might 
be such a union of the divine and human in a true man, 
that, while fully marked by all the qualities, character- 
istics and limitations of humanity, he should yet, in his 
essential nature, be truly divine, " very God of very 
God." 

Without pressing too closely the literal sense of single 
passages, we may hold it as unquestionable that in the 
conception of Christ, of his nature, as at once human and 

1 John Adams wrote in his old age to Thomas Jefferson, if I remember 
rightly a passage read nearly thirty years ago : "I cannot believe in three 
Gods, who are yet one God." 

210 



THE MAN DIVINE. 211 

divine, and of his relation to the Father, which was held 
in common by all the New Testament writers, the follow- 
ing eight propositions are involved : 

I. God is strictly one. " The Lord our God is one 
Lord." — Mark xii, 19. 

II. Christ has his own separate personality, in which 
he exists as a being distinct from the Father. " Consider 
the Apostle and High Priest of our profession, Christ 
Jesus, who was faithful to him that appointed him." — 
Heb. iii, 1, 2. 

III. Christ was and is a man. " There is one Medi- 
ator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus." — 1 
Tim. ii, 5. 

IV. Christ is divine and one with the Father. " In 
the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with 
God, and the Word was God. And the Word was made 
flesh and dwelt among us." — John i, 1, 14. 

V. Christ existed in divine glory before his birth as a 
man. " Glorify thou me with thine own self, with the 
glory which I had with thee before the world was." — 
John xvii, 5. 

VI. Christ was the Creator of all things. "For by 
him were all things created. . . . And he is before 
all things, and by him all things consist." — Col. i, 16, 17. 

VII. Christ is the King supreme, and the final Judge 
of men. " When the Son of Man shall come in his 
glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit 
upon the throne of his glory. And before him shall be 
gathered all nations : and he shall separate them one 
from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the 
goats. Then shall the King say unto them on his right 
hand : Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the king- 
dom prepared for you from the foundation of the world." 
—Mat. xxv, 31, 32, 34. 



212 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

VIII. Christ is subordinate to the Father, and sub- 
ject to his law. " My Father is greater than I." " I 
have kept my Father's commandments, and abide in his 
love." — John xiv, 28 ; xv, 10. 

We have thus before us the great paradox of the Chris- 
tian faith. On the one hand, we are taught that, in his 
spiritual being, Christ is no other than the Infinite Spirit, 
the Eternal God, one with the Father. But it is dis- 
tinctly affirmed, on the other hand, that during his mortal 
life he was a true man, fully characterized by all the 
qualities and limitations of humanity, all the attributes 
of his divinity being for the time wholly veiled, and in 
abeyance. He was " made of a woman, made under the 
law." He was born as other men are born, suffered as 
they suffer, died as they die. He was possessed of no di- 
vine powers or prerogatives in active exercise, had no 
consciousness of his own divine nature, and no knowledge 
of such a nature until he acquired it, as other men acquire 
knowledge, by instruction from without, or from his own 
reasonings. He was subordinate to the Father, subject 
to law, exposed to temptation, capable of sin. He was 
born like other men without knowledge or power, the 
mere germ, in body and in mind, of his coming manhood. 
From this intellectual blank of his early infancy he grew, 
just as other men grow, in mental stature, in strength of 
mind, in knowledge, and in wisdom. 

Such is the doctrine, to which the New Testament 
stands fully committed, respecting the union of the divine 
and human in the person of Christ. Through all the 
ages of the Christian past it has seemed a hopeless para- 
dox, a mystery which the human mind could never pene- 
trate or explain. Can it be that with the light which advan- 
cing knowledge is throwing upon our own human nature, 
this great mystery, like so many other mysteries, is 



THE MAN DIVINE. 213 

destined to melt away ? Can it be that in this clearer 
light we shall be able so to understand this great truth 
that there- will appear in it nothing contradictory, im- 
possible, or absurd ; nothing which the human mind can- 
not understand as clearly as it can the mystery of its own 
nature ; and so nothing which we cannot hold by a rea- 
sonable and an intelligent faith? It may be so. It may 
be that to this clearer view it is possible for us even now 
to attain. 

Before we can see how it was possible that Christ 
should be both God and man, we must first answer the 
question — What is man ? 

Man is a composite existence, made up of a physical 
organism which we call the body, and a spiritual force, 
vitalizing and actuating the body, which we call the spirit 
or soul. Of these two component factors of our human 
nature, it is the body, and not the soul, which is pre- 
dominant and controlling. The body conditions every 
thing. So far as we now know, or can know, the soul, 
although an individual existence, sprung in its germ from 
the life of the father, has no personality of its own, is 
not capable of an active, an intelligent, or even of a con- 
scious existence apart from the body. It comes to con- 
sciousness in and through the body, is absolutely de- 
pendent on the body, cannot act, cannot be conscious of 
its own existence, except by the aid of its material organ. 
It is a force unknown, incomprehensible, immeasurable. 
We know nothing of its greatness, of the real extent or 
magnitude of its powers. It is limited by the body, as 
the power of the stream is limited by the wheel through 
which its force is applied. With a wheel of only a ten- 
horse power, the Mississippi, with all its waters, can exert 
no more than the power of ten horses. So far as we know, 
the soul of any man may possess powers ten times, a 



214 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

hundred times, a thousand times greater than, through 
its present organism, it is able to display. We say that 
Newton has a mighty, a gigantic mind ; that an idiot has 
no mind at all. Yet the difference between these two 
men is wholly in the body, not at all in the unknown 
spiritual force behind the body. Let Newton's brain 
soften, and he becomes an idiot ; and, if the process of decay 
goes far enough, while he still lives* his mind will wholly 
cease to act, will lose all consciousness of its own ex- 
istence, and he will lie before us a mere breathing corpse. 
On the other hand, as the result of merely physical 
treatment, by which the defects of his imperfect body 
are to some extent removed, the fettered and hidden 
mind of the idiot is often enabled to blaze forth in as- 
tonishing, though usually eccentric and one-sided, power. 
But if the body conditions every thing in the powers 
and capabilities of the man ; if the unknown spiritual 
force behind the body might be ten times, a thousand 
times, a million times greater than it actually is, yet no 
slightest sign of this added greatness be manifest in the 
man, it follows that it might be infinitely greater than 
the ordinary human soul, yet the man be still precisely 
the same. But this, according to the most positive 
teachings of the New Testament, was just what was true 
of Christ, the Son of Man and the Son of God. He had 
no individual soul, sprung from a germ derived from the 
life of a human father. He was made of a woman, but 
was born without a human father, by the power of the 
Holy Ghost. His body, conditioning everything in his 
composite existence, made him a true man ; but the un- 
known spiritual force behind his body was the infinite 
Spirit, the eternal God. In simplest, most literal truth, 
he was one with the Father, " very God of very God." 



• THE MAN DIVINE. 21 5 

But at this point a very important question arises. If 
this view is correct ; if the body of Christ conditioned 
every thing in his mortal life, so that the infinite Spirit 
within him could be, in its manifestation, no greater and 
no more than a human soul would have been, what was 
gained by his divinity, by the incarnation of the divine 
Spirit in his person ? and what did his essential divinity 
enable him to accomplish in any way, or for any end, be- 
yond what he might have accomplished as a mere man ? 

In considering this question we may observe : 

1. The complete veiling of our Lord's divinity was 
part of that humiliation by which he prepared himself to 
redeem the world. Nor did it in any wise, or to any 
degree, invalidate or hinder his redeeming and atoning 
work. None the less, because for the time his divinity 
was veiled, was he the Son of God, his well-beloved Son, 
the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. 
It was the Son of God whose blood was shed upon the 
cross, the one sufficient sacrifice for sin, " the Lamb of 
God, who taketh away the sins of the world." 

2. As it relates to the glorified state of Christ the 
eternal King, we may feel sure that the full and sufficient 
answer to this question is to be found in the nature of 
the spiritual body. What we any of us are in our real 
spiritual nature, and what we shall be in a future and 
perfect life, doth not yet appear. In our present state 
the soul is limited, shut in, narrowed down, by a material 
organism utterly inadequate to its powers. But our faith 
is that in the resurrection this shall not be so. We be- 
lieve that, in the spiritual body, every soul shall find an 
instrument fully adequate to the exercise of its utmost 
powers. And we believe that this is just as true of the 
spiritual body of Christ, as it will be of our own spiritual 
bodies. King of Kings, seated at the right hand of the 



216 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

Majesty on high, he still retains the human form, is still 
as truly man as when he walked the earth in his mortal 
life. But his spiritual body, as ours will be, is fully 
adequate to the perfect manifestation and exercise of all 
the attributes and powers of the soul within ; so that in 
and through his spiritual body, he lives in the full con- 
sciousness and active exercise of all the prerogatives and 
powers of his inherent divinity. 

It only remains to consider the teachings of the New 
Testament concerning the pre-existence of Christ, and the 
glory which he had with the Father, the creating power 
and providential government which he exercised with 
the Father, before the world was. In the many and 
very positive expressions upon this point which are 
found in every part of the New Testament, it is very 
clear that Christ himself, and his disciples following his 
example, identify him with the creating and governing 
Logos, or Word, of God. The word which we speak is 
the manifestation, the revelation of the hidden, unknown, 
incomprehensible soul. God is an infinite Spirit, " whom 
no man hath seen, or can see." The revelation which 
he has made of himself in his works and in his inspired 
Book, are his Word, through which alone we can know 
him. Taking up this idea, and adopting, with modifica- 
tions, a very ancient conception of heathen philosophy, 
the later Jewish thinkers accustomed themselves to 
speak of God in action, God manifesting himself in his 
creating and providential work, as the Logos, or Word. 
And to this divine Logos they ascribed the attributes of 
personality. They spoke of the Logos as creating, as 
actively exercising all the powers of deity. With this 
creating Logos, who was in the beginning with God, and 
was God ; the express image of the Father's person, and 
by whom he made the worlds, Christ is, in the New Testa- 
ment, clearly identified. 



THE MAN DIVINE. 21 J 

Upon this point we may observe that inasmuch as 
Christ was a man, while the creating Logos was not a 
man, any completeness of personal identity between the 
two was clearly impossible. According to the view now 
presented, the separate personality of Christ belongs 
wholly to his humanity. It results from the acting of 
the divine Spirit through a human body. We find no 
reason for ascribing any such distinct personality to 
the creating Logos. We have no better ground for be- 
lieving that that Logos was a being distinct from the 
Father, endowed separately with consciousness, percep- 
tion, memory, reason, and volition, than we have for at- 
tributing a like separate personality to the corresponding 
" word " of a man. So far as we can see, the creating 
Logos as a personality is a mere mental abstraction. We 
can regard that Logos as nothing more, and nothing else, 
than a method of the divine manifestation. If this view 
is correct, Christ is one with the creating Logos, just as 
he is one with the Father. He was the full manifesta- 
tion, the perfect Word of the Father, and he might well 
feel that in him all the earlier manifestations which the 
Father had made of himself were continued and per- 
fected. The New Testament conception would thus be 
this : The Logos created all things ; Christ is the per- 
fect Word of God ; the spiritual essence of both is the 
whole being of God ; therefore both are the same. 



[END.] 



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G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS NEW YORK. 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: April 2005 

PreservationTechnologies 

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(724)779-2111 



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